


Divine Interventions

by optimouse



Category: Alexander (2004)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Greece, Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, Gender Issues, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-02 12:26:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 62,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16786930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/optimouse/pseuds/optimouse
Summary: The Gods walk the earth of Macedon, taking steps at Philip of Macedon's wedding at Aigai.In the aftermath, Princes and Companions struggle to survive and protect the King.Alternative universe with a strong fantasy flavor.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a years' long project that has gone back into my 'working-on' queue for the moment.
> 
> I do not give any permissions for this to be posted anywhere else.

The day was dusty, indeed, it was always dusty. Sun had shone down on the earth beneath, warm, but not scorching. As Athenian weddings were, they had chosen to have Cleopatra’s wedding to Alexander, brother of the former Queen Olympias, wife of Philip, in the evening. The sands of Aigai could radiate heat, and they were keeping the wedding short, hopefully. The feasting would happen in every pavilion in Aigai, but the wedding itself was outside, in the theatre.

Cleopatra had been taken by Alexander already, the main parts of the wedding finished. He had yet to feed her quince, but that would follow her father’s entrance into the theatre, and his grasp of Alexander’s hand in friendship. It was a last symbol of enhanced closeness between the Epirate dynasty and Phillip’s Macedonian kingdom, in part patching the relationships torn in his decision to nominate Eurydice as his Queen, replacing Olympias in a move that tied Philip more closely to the Macedonian nobility, but weakened his control over foreign influences.

“He’s just giving more power to that orgiastic whore.” Hephaistion disagreed with Amyntor’s statement, disagreeing with it on principle. He might not always agree with Olympias’ methods, but he understood some of her views on this. Her son was the preoccupation of her existence in many ways, and he’d never thought that she’d use Cleopatra to further her aims. For one, Olympias had rarely been as possessive of Cleopatra as she was of Alexander. “Eurydice’s a proper Macedonian woman,” Hephaistion mouthed the next few words. “not some foreign cunny.” For a former ambassador to Athens and a devout believer in commerce, Amyntor was one hell of a xenophobe. Perhaps it had started by his father visiting Athens, the Athenians certainly held similar beliefs. At the least, his father had learnt caution from Hephaistion’s conception. The gods were beings around whom one was cautious, Hephaistion’s mother had taught him. As a priestess of Aphrodite, she certainly understood some facets of what she spoke.

“How is Hermione?” Hephaistion asked of his step mother from his father, his eyes scanning the crowds. The servants had added torches to the giant raised lamps illuminating the area; an expensive proposition that made a spectacle of the wedding. Everyone within travelling distance of Aigai who could attend the wedding was attending the wedding to see Philip. While the king’s face was emblazoned on the coinage, many didn’t necessarily see the coins, and besides, seeing the king of a united Macedon, the man who held a formerly strife-ridden Macedon together was something about which to tell ones children about, grand children. The feasting at the expense of Philip was also a lure.

He’d known this, but Alexander had examined Philip’s planning in this regard, trying to develop that ability to plot for the allegiance of others. He had his own version, but Alexander’s was based more on a personal charisma that his father lacked and made up for with a harder form. Bait and threat, that was what Philip preferred, to Hephaistion’s personal knowledge. He had been a hostage for his father’s allegiance, and the continued blessings of Aphrodite from his mother’s temple. Nessa had sent a rather angered letter to Philip, Hephaistion remembered, regarding that.

“Hermione is well,” Amyntor looked at his son, and sighed. The youth had much of his mother’s eyes in him, the sea foam in the gray of the iris, a slighter build than usually found in Macedon. “Amynttas asked after you the other day, wished to ask if you might be willing to give him tips on wrestling.” Amynttas, properly Amyntor, was the oldest of Amyntor’s legitimate children, just eleven and starting his military training. There were two more children, Ptolemy, at seven, and Berenike, a pretty thing at five, all gap teeth and smiles. Hermione would not ask after him, Hephaistion knew.

There were many people here for the wedding. Alexander of Epirus had brought a sizeable delegation, and Olympias was currently speaking with several of them. Her sister was one of them, for as her son was named after her brother, her daughter shared a name with her sister, this sister married to further tie her brother to the Epirate aristocracy. This intermarriage was certainly practical.

He could catch a glimpse of Philip’s party from where he was standing. Hephaistion had chosen to stand alone, but his father had seen him making his way towards several fellow former students at Mieza. The bodyguards were massing, which meant to his knowledge, that the rest of the ceremony would finish soon and the feasting commence. The celebration was the first since the celebration of the espousal of Eurydice to Philip that Alexander and Olympias would attend in good standing within Philip’s court, if not their best, and he’d thought that everyone would be as happily anticipatory of this as he was. Less strife, correct? One of the bodyguards looked to be speaking quietly, and his eyesight wasn’t sharp enough to see the words, and besides, the bodyguards and Philip were obscured by the statues of the Olympians and that other statue, the one that he’d wondered if it were not sacrilegious soon to be moved out into the main area of the theater. Some of the slaves were already bending down to start lifting the statues and to take them out into the theatre, through the sanctuary first.

Eurydice in her peplos of indigo looked lovely. Her stomach was still deflating from the latest birth, Hephaistion noticed, and she carried the babe in her arms, a visual representation of her worth to the throne. One of her handmaidens sat at her side, and Hephaistion noted that the girl looked bruised across the face, as if she’d been slapped. The girl was bracketed on the other side by Attalus’ son and heir, Attacles. The familiar profile had a strong nose and cheek bones, a broad forehead, and the shoulders that many of the Macedonian men developed. He was growing a beard, brown, like his hair, Hephaistion noted. It had never happened while Attalus was within his heir’s vicinity, Hephaistion had only just realized, never having been close to the man who had reached maturity years before he had. He was in white, Attacles was, and the man had always seemed far more frugal in taste than that peplos of indigo. Red might be an expensive dye, one that Olympias used at times, but that outfit was exorbitant.

“Yes,” Hephaistion realized that he’d spent too much time not saying anything at all to his father, spending the time scanning the crowd. Something felt off this evening, as if the waves that he _heard_ at all times were whipping up into a frenzy, lightning thundering and the air smelling as if it had smoked within the last few hours, sounds that he’d heard but rarely, once the night that Alexander had fled Pella following Hephaistion’s attempt to convince the Carian Prince to marry his daughter to Alexander in the stead of Arrhidaeus. “apologies Father, I was distracted.”

“By the whore’s son?” Hephaistion’s eyes were pulled away from his father, from Philip’s procession starting and over to Alexander, where he stood with Arrhidaeus. Kind, quiet, sweet Arrhidaeus whose mother was not wife, like his mother was not wife, acknowledged as Philip’s son but not as heir. They were standing near Meda, another wife of Philip, and Olympias. While Meda and Olympias did not always share affection for each other, he’d always thought that the pair of them had at the least mutual respect. Meda had yet to bear Philip a son that lived past the first few months, and had miscarried multiple times. She bore the disgrace well, Hephaistion thought, a slender woman with dark penetrating eyes, shorter and less buxom than Olympias, but perhaps one of Philip’s wives that he had any true romantic affection for at the moment. Alexander and Arrhidaeus were murmuring quietly to each other, probably regarding the horses that were their gift to their sister’s new husband in honor of the wedding.

The slender circlet of gold on Alexander’s head shone like the gold of his hair, and he lost his breath for a second, that gold against the tan of his skin, spread across the white of the cloth that was spread across the recessed bed, the lamp shining from the nearby table.

“Yes, distracted by him for a moment.” There, another familiar face. What was Barsine doing in the general crowd. She knew that she was allowed to sit with the women, correct. Her dark eyes were set wide in a dusky face, and she’d adopted the Greek style of dress. She wasn’t in the peplos, but in an ionic outfit, almost a gauzy fabric that was similar to the clothing of her Persian heritage. Perhaps that was why she was there, Barsine was cousins, vaguely, of one of the Persian ambassadors, and they seemed to be exchanging greetings. She was smiling, white teeth in golden brown skin, shining brightly like the teeth of an angry lion, like the one that he’d seen in the scrolls that Aristotle had brought out at Mieza.

Hephaistion’s eyes went back to the spectacle as the crowd quieted, the music swelling, and the waves practically shrieking in his ears, warning, warning of something that he couldn’t see. Hephaistion was on the balls of his feet, trying to run to somewhere that he had no clue where it existed. First came Zeus and his wife Hera, her eyes almost grinning in malice, as if a bit of her spirit were embodied in her statuary.

One by one each Olympian came through the sanctuary, their statues familiar faces to those in the arena, the last pair smiling, but in Aphrodite’s eyes warnings, her lips almost whispering to him of strife. The last statue came out, Philip enthroned as if a god. On the front of his robes, Hephaistion saw it. A blade, aimed to the heart, blood pouring down the robes of the statue. A blink, it was gone, but Hephaistion was already on his way, trying to run through the crowd.

Last out walked Philip, his bodyguards in phalanx behind him, a smile on his face. Against the gray of his hair, almost the color of ash now, the wreath of golden leaves shone in the light of the lamps, and behind him.

The slender youth, older than Hephaistion, he’d pulled a knife, and broken rank with his comrades.

Hephaistion was shouting, the youth, Pausanias, now he remembered his name. Philip’s former favorite, raped while Alexander had fled, the rumors had spread. The youth was lunging forward, and it was as if the world had ended, everything no longer moving except her.

A woman, white armed with the shine around her of gods and grey, grey eyes. The cloak she wore was as if owl wings surrounded her, and her arm was deflecting the blow from the heart of the king, and Philip was falling, a blade having gone against his chest.

Across the theatre, Alexander was also running, words falling out of his mouth, “Athena! Praise be!” and the world began again as Pausanias ran, Alexander catching his father and yelling at the guards as Hephaistion arrived at his side. “Catch him!” His hands were going to the bleeding in his father’s side. “A doctor, a doctor, call a doctor!”

The words began to run through the crowd, and it was as if the word was ending and starting again, arguments and tears.

Pausanias was running.

_Hera, Hera, hear my call, vengeance against Zeus’ kin not of your loins._

_Dike, Justice for injustice, come to my aid, allow me retribution for insult, for injury._

Running, and his footsteps echoed in his ears, his heartbeat faster. When she had come to him, tawny smiles and intimated kindness, words of help, he’d listened. She had said words that made sense, brought him letters that made similar sense.

“He’s wronged you.” Those were the words that had seduced him, words that he’d agreed with, probably to the disagreement of so many others. And it hadn’t just been her, her adoption of the Greek style of dress was something he’d noticed. Oh, that was fakery, if he didn’t see that immediately. She preferred this thin gauze fabric instead of the fabrics that most women of the court wore, gauze so thin that it draped over her nipples and left little to his admittedly strong imagination. The dark shadow at the apex of her thighs was barely obscured by the folds of cloth, and she usually layered them, in retrospect. Seduction physically as well as with words of vengeance.

Behind him feet added to the chorus, bounding against the packed earth of Aigai, still warm with the heat of the day as he pushed people aside in his haste to get away. His hand had been true, almost as if a phantom hand had inhabited the end of his arm, and the man who had given permission to _that man_ , his brother through marriage, he was almost dead. _That man,_ he had committed injustice but sought to repay it when he’d realized that his assumption of a desire for violence to be wrong.

His son had come to him, weeks before, following in the wake of the Athenian visitor speaking with him. It was important that Philip die, before he committed yet another injustice. The other Pausanias was fulfilled in his death at the hands of the enemy, before Philip could allow, no, encourage another indiscretion, another harsh ending of a relationship, another violation of his physical body. The honor lost.

And now he was running, running from his ally in this, running from another.

He had the dagger in his hand, a blade dedicated to vengeance for the crimes against him, one’s will forced through another’s hands, another’s cock, and he had nearly sunk it into its rightful home. She had suddenly been there, her hand on his wrist, moving, until he could feel the blade sink into flesh and slide, scrape, crunch downward, slipping on ribs and wrenching against muscle.

_Stop!_

Words had echoed in his head, words left unspoken, and he’d seen grey-eyed Hephaistion running through a frozen crowd stutter, his steps halt and start again, eyes wider than he’d seen on Alexander’s catamite. Blond hair had blurred, caught his eye as the glint of gold that usually was only seen in day also shone in front of him, hair colored in words he could not explain on the woman in front of him. Godhood here, and her arms were the moon’s pale taste of goat’s cheese, the powder that filled the mountains of home at all times, and the valleys in the winter. White-armed Athena.

White-armed Athena, the goddess that the bards still sung of and her deeds in the war against Troy, against Wilusa, the supremacy of the Greeks, the Macedonians, Thracians, Epirates, all had been proven. Achilles’ blood flowed in the veins of Olympias, the Epirote wife of Philip, whose grandsire some many time was Zeus.

Poseidon had touched the sides of the ship that he’d rode to war in, hands of water pushing and pulling against walls of wood and tar, seeking a way in as well as to propel. In his mountains, he’d watched his mother hear the pipes of Dionysus, answering them with feet fleet with wine, writing patterns on the turf with slender white feet as she joined with the dancing women.

Athena, white-armed Athena had interfered, and she did no bidding that was not her mother-father’s or her own will, Vengeance, Dike interfered with by the Judge.

 _Stop!_ She said, to him, her hands moving his hand, changing the direction of the blade, the direction of the plan. His life would have been sacrificed to the death of Philip, he had known this, but with a Philip whom was still alive? This he had not been prepared to deal with, made no plans as to the finality of his life.

He would die, Pausanias could not help but know this. Philip’s blood into the sand of Aigai would be joined by his own, finally joined in death their essences, as their essence had once painted white designs between his thighs and onto his stomach. Letters had been painted onto his chest, hands scarred with war drawing thick fingers and arousing joy with a trace of fingernail. Oh, but this was that final joy, the lover and the beloved, _erastes_ and _eromenos,_ but truly, man and beloved doll mingled together. The love that apparently had been met with faint carnal affection transformed into love met with mild as maid amusement and tolerance that had become mild disdain as his own love had become obsession, and then the amusement even lost, malice replacing it in Philip’s emotions. Oh, but obsessed love spurned had created something greater.

His thighs were starting to burn, and the thick population of the wedding arena had ceased grabbing at his cloak, pulling at his tunic, and his sandals were no longer competing with others. Behind him he could hear the shouts of his fellow guards.

 _Stop!_ Athena had said to him, his wrist squeezed by a hand strong with war, but untouched by scars, pushing his hand from its course. Behind him the guards burst from the last of the theater, joining him on the packed earth of the road as he ran. Down, down, down the hills. He could hide, run, obscure himself in the mountains, but he could not run fast enough to make it up the mountainside. He was younger than they were, but that meant only that he had spent less time running in full armor than they had, less time to develop muscles like that of a horse to propel himself into a gallop, escape the predators snapping at his heels with teeth of metal and eyes full of betrayal and full knowledge of what he had done afore he had actually done it.

Down the foothills of the mountains, down through the town, the huddle of houses and buildings, shops. The taverna would not miss him, their lights vaguely lighting his way but blinding the occupants to his presence, the dark of the night not catching on his red cloak like the sun would, instead darkening it to nearly mute with the night. Beside him the buildings had grown to stone, edifices to past kings, now dead.

So many kings, many of them venerated by those whose dynasties had killed them, replacing them with themselves and offering funerary libations in repayment. _That man_ , his neice was the mother of a son recognized as legitimate by Philip, whose blood had squirted against the ground, discoloring his tunic gleaming white in the lights strewn around the theatre, making tunic the color of his cloak. That son, a replacement for the king. Two sons only recognized as legitimate, a third of an age with the elder, recognized as fruit of Philip’s loins, Pausanias knew, but not as legitimate for to receive the throne.

 _Stop!_ She had whispered into his mind, her sword lancing through his heart bloodlessly, never touching skin, bone, flesh, organ, muscle. Truths in his mind, Goddess of wisdom gifting him with things only unfolding now. His sandals slowed, these tombs were the place of the dynasties of Macedon, war and assassination the only constant in their deaths. Every forty seasons one more king had joined them for more years than he could think of, sometimes one per season as the self-proclaimed kings painted their faces with the blood of their predecessor before trying to conquer another self-proclaimed king and failing, perhaps at times briefly winning.

Behind him sandals grew closer. What honor, Pausanias could not help but question, was there in running? Regicide was one thing, done in the name of vengeance, but another if he was but the hand of another self-proclaimed king trying to stain a blade with the blood of his predecessor without touching a body. Eighty seasons Philip had reigned over a Macedon united, the turmoil expelled outwards as multitudes of kings became chieftains, lords of an aristocracy created with his sword, the phalanx, and his iron shield around their children.

Heirs of kings made lords, little princes taught by Philip’s largesse and kept safe by his guard, his generals his mouths, and what now if a mouth spoke for itself, his hands no longer the hands of the king? Foolishness not to listen to the heir of _that man_ when he’d spoken so vaguely about tempering justice with wisdom and patience. That good things came to the man who waited calmly, and considered that not all words meant the first meaning thought of, sometimes the second meaning or the third being correct in scenarios. That sometimes treachery was not immediately visible in the eyes of a country man.

 _Stop!_ She had whispered to him, and now he stopped, his sandals against the earth, around him the stone tombs of kings of Macedon who had died at the hands of others, so few dying of old age or illness uncreated by poison. Poison, yes, poison spoken through lips of carmine, smiling as she mouthed words that now did not ring true. What reason had a Persian concubine to co-operate in his vengeance, nay, to encourage him to violence? Why would she sway plump breasts that were bound to the will of the man who would be king underneath his eyes, if it were not at the will of someone else?

Alexander, Pausanias thought, would not trust a woman other than his mother to do such treachery, if he were to try to kill his father. Barsine of the bared leg, enticing views and engendering lust with a shapely calf was not Alexander’s spy-master. Ptolemy and Cleitus were Alexander’s advisors of hard force, and his knower of secrets, the whisperer of words engineering change, the hands that manipulated the earth of souls and mind, he would never be banished from Philip’s court, _that man_ had once said.

Barsine used sinuous body and words tipped in poison to manipulate, peace implied in a body that whored to end a war, that was it.

 _Stop!_ White-armed Athena had shrieked, and he had stopped, as the traitor-guard and his wholesome fellow one caught up to him. _Stop and remember!_

Attalus had listed his name as one of many on a list for a party, and Pausanias, he had answered the lure. He was the youngest name on the list by far, at last he would be recognized as important.

There, the guard he had spoken with, who had spoken with the Persian woman, and been twixt her legs, he would not be surprised, he had his sword out, pulling even with Pausanias.

 _Stop and remember!_ The words were barely a whisper now. “Tight piece of ass!” Bent over the arm of a couch, pain pulsing up to the base of his skull and pooling at the base of his spine, blood oozing, dripping, dyeing the skin of his thighs brown as purple began to pool under the skin nearly punctured by the talons of an old man. “Keep on struggling, little whore.” Malice in the words, malice entwined with a wine-deepened lust. That was perhaps even wrong. The white hair of _that man’s_ groin had nearly kept the wrinkled cock nestling inside, dampened by the wine. Malice, greed, lust. Selfishness, those words had implied. Selfishness.

 _Stop and remember_! The sword was sheathed, following the path of Athena’s words into his heart, pushing through muscle and tissue, organ and bone and erupting the other side as his fellow traitor knew the truth of the matter. Pausanias had been an unwitting assassin instead of the hand of Dike, enacting vengeance, justice in an act that he’d thought to be coincidental regicide.

The sword met with the earth as the corpse fell backwards, stabbing into the earth carrying the blood with it that had meant to be united in death with one who he had thought had betrayed him. Two pairs of sandals stepped on a cloak that matched the color of the corpse’s, fast going the dark of wine as blood dried to brown.

“They wanted him alive!” Pausanias heard his former comrade berate.

“They never issued an order.” The conspirator answered, and more words exited a mouth that spoke distruths. “The traitor was going for his sword.”

omthe bar

“A doctor, a doctor, call a doctor!” He screamed, shouted, enunciated very loudly. Barely a moment before he had been speaking with Arrhidaeus, the horses that were to go back to Epirus with his uncle and his sister were gorgeous. It had crashed over him like a wave, pulling him beneath the surface with hands like claws, digging into his heart as _she_ had stepped in.

_Stop!_ It still hummed through his mind, the words galvanizing him. Pale arms shielding her brother, another child of Zeus. _Stop and remember!_ He would remember this, the blood staining his skin as he pressed his hands to his father’s side, a hand over his, another body crowding him.

There, grey eyes going the blue of the ocean, capable hands full of death-red cloth balled, pushing his hands aside, the cloth pressing against the rending in the flesh. “Alexander, we need to move him.” Whispers began to seep into his ears, understanding slowly worming its way through his mind as the shock bled away. “It will be more painful for him if we have to cleanse the wound of sand.” Sense spoken from familiar lips.

“Hephaistion?” Alexander listened, he could not not listen to words from that chest. “Cassander, Arrhidaeus, I need your arms, Arrhidaeus, take off your cloak.” His brother stood a head taller than he did, and three handspans wider in shoulders. “Lay the cloak flat on the ground next to Father.” His eyes went to those who had clustered close.

Polyperchon’s familiar face was grim, Antipater’s wrinkles framing a face set with wariness, anger simmering. Meda was biting her lip, hands gripping tightly her skirt, Mother was next to her. There was Eurydice, arms full of Caranus, Europa clutching at her cloak, her hands squeezing the cloth, as if tears were trying to escape it, pour over her hands as they poured from her whitened face.

“Where’s the assassin?” He asked, moving to his father’s feet as his brother spread the cloak out. Above his father’s head, Hephaistion kept a tight grip on the cloak, while using his other hand to move grip a shoulder. “No, that won’t work.” Eyes for a safe, strong person. “Antipater, grab Father’s shoulders. On three we move him onto the cloak, and then Polyperchon can help us take him to the Palace, Meda, find the doctor and have him meet us there.”

Sensible words, Antipater thought, sensible words while the king murmured low, a groan of pain as his blood dyed red cloth nearly the purple of the mountain wine that had been brought for tonight’s wedding. “Two guards are catching Pausanias, he will be found.” He would take the lead in this thing, ask the questions. His king stabbed by his own bodyguard, trust betrayed by one deemed without stain on his honor. “Alexander.” His words were safe, he hoped. The boy seemed traumatized by his father’s attack, but the boy had also quarreled twice, so very fiercely, with his father in the last few years. Assassination was not a thing thought of as too low for a man with the ambition to be the king of Macedon, it was near to a rite of passage. “Be careful.”

The two that Alexander had called, and Polyperchon, Antipater noted. His loyalty to Phillip was unquestioned, but strong, strong enough that it had overcome Polyperchon’s friendship with Olympias, his words to Philip having thwarted Olympias’ plotting in the past. Arrhidaeus, Alexander’s closest rival for his father’s love, for all he was not to inherit, it was not without possibility that he could, that he would inherit. Alexander’s closest ally, though one might consider his mother to be closest, but her agenda was not the same as his at all times, and this ally did Alexander’s bidding to the word, the idea, the ideal.

Speaking of ideals, allies. Alexander’s Companions had been banished, and that was merely that they were not to be where the court was, and Antipater thought that he knew where they were, but that could be inaccurate. Conspiracy he could inquire of Pausanias when the assassin, the attempter of regicide was caught.

The king was being conveyed into the street, only those carrying the cloak accompanying him, other than his wives in a gaggle, trailing him. As he passed on his make-shift litter, Alexander felt, saw, heard the people. Whispers, songs and prayers filled the air, ululations of mourning replacing the songs that had been sung to celebrate the birth of a new relationship between Epirus and Macedon, a wedding of kings. This was to have been a day bright with promise, and instead the dawn would approach with dread as the country held its breath in anticipation of news.

“Philip.” “Philip-King, blessed of Athena.” “Philip, long may the king live.” “Apollo, give thy blessings on our king.” Hands touched the king, touched the cloak bearing him. Well wishes filled the air, and then another strong, stringent voice, familiar to him growing louder still. “You four!” He did not look back, but he felt Antipater’s intent. “Follow the king to the Palace, and do not leave his side even after the doctor has arrived!” Around him the crowd parted, four men in the garb of the Army, on duty for crowd control tonight, but now to guard the King gathered around them, forming a phalanx, an honor guard for a fallen king being born off the field of battle.

His eyes met blue eyes, hints of grey as his Hephaistion looked over at him, lip caught on his teeth in worry, unable or unwilling to verbalize what he was afraid of. Alexander risked a look at the capable hands, and grimaced as honeyed skin was streaked with carmine, drying in the air, none as fresh. His eyes flashed back up, and his friend nodded.

No more fresh blood, but did that mean that the blood flow had been staunched, or rather that it had run out, that there was no more blood left to flow, the king nearly dead. The king, his father.


	2. Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a years' long project that has gone back into my 'working-on' queue for the moment.
> 
> I do not give any permissions for this to be posted anywhere else.
> 
> The plan is for each chapter to be released every 7 days.

“Alexander.” Antipater went to the figure, slumped against his companion, another third man standing with them. “Arrhidaeus.” A smile from that one, and the third looked to him, an expression on his face of either recognition or worry that Antipater was not familiar enough with Amyntor’s illegitimate son to read. “Apollocles,” the doctor had adopted the name of one of the patrons of healing years before, or rather he was addressed by a familiar name to remind the speaker of his cause, his endeavors in health. “Apollocles sent out a boy a few moments ago, the blood flow is definitely dry, and he is going to clean the wound in.” His eyes travelled around the room.

Meda sat on a chair, her peplos pooled around her as one of her handmaids held her hand and wrapped an arm around her slender waist, eyes dark with worry as her mistress’ eyes reddened with tears. Olympias had left the antechamber to the sickroom, headed with another woman, her handmaid, Antipater thought, towards the temple. Eurydice had left, her face pale, at his urging. It would not do for her fear to dry her milk, starving an heir of the kingdom.

“When can we see him?” Alexander asked. His brother echoed it.

“Not until he wakes up.” Antipater conveyed. “But I want you, all of you, to leave.” His eyes encompassed the men. “I’ve set a guard rotation around this room, using the Army rather than King Philip’s bodyguards, and I’m going to send people to talk to you.” Men, of course.

“You think I would hurt my father?” Alexander’s voice was incredulous.

“He thinks that I had a hand in this!” The anger was certainly notable, and not entirely surprising. Alexander’s personal issues with his father were well known, both in the court and among his companions. Murder was not his usual view of how the situation should be fixed, and Hephaistion knew that the only answer to how his Alexander would kill his father would be in the heat of anger. It had come surprisingly close to happening two years before during the incident with the Carian prince.

“And why wouldn’t you?” Cassander yelled, and Hephaistion couldn’t help but wince. It wasn’t that he didn’t agree that his lover had a better argument for the throne than Caranus, but rather that he knew that the person far more likely to have had a hand in this was Olympias, and she simply hadn’t.

“Hephaistion?” A question that he heard and had no intention to back up Cassander’s argument with Alexander and Arrhidaeus. Cassander hadn’t angered Philip enough in the Carian affair to have been banished, or worse to Hephaistion, held hostage both as punishment and as leverage against Alexander’s good behavior. For all that both Arrhidaeus and Cassander had been in the court while Alexander had fled, Hephaistion held only good thoughts of Arrhidaeus in regards to that time period in his life.

“I will not back you up on this, Cassander!” Hephaistion spoke with iron words, sharpened with flint knives. “Do you not remember what I do for Alexander?” He asked, trying to remind his old friend about his actual role, other than warming Alexander’s bed. “If such a thing had happened, it would have gone through me, Cassander.”

“So you’re saying that you didn’t arrange for Alexander’s interests in the assassination of Philip?” A smile of mockery, one that Hephaistion verbally dismissed. “That Alexander’s interests couldn’t have been exercised through another?” Leonnatus sneered again.

“Oh, his interests could have been exercised by another ,” Hephaistion started.

“But not without Hephaistion’s knowledge.” Arrhidaeus may not always agree with his brother’s catamite’s place in his life, but he acknowledged it. Little went on in Philip’s court that had anything to do with Alexander that Hephaistion did not have any knowledge of. His mother’s place as concubine had similar effects to Nessa, a priestess of Aphrodite, giving allegiance of palace staff and those sworn to religion. Arrhidaeus knew much talk of the palace loose women, Hephaistion knew of much confessed to those religious in an attempt to realize how much it would cost them to bribe the gods to be more favorable to their blasphemies of choice. “You know what happened the last time that Alexander asked that Hephaistion act to subvert Philip’s will in a thing that Hephaistion reported to him. I may not have wanted to wed the Carian princess, for all she was offered to me,” that said, she would have ended up maneuvering him into asking or forcing his way in the inheritance. “but Alexander, that was ill thought of you.”

Only Arrhidaeus, in light of being Alexander’s brother could get away with saying something that pointed to Alexander. Many may have thought it, but with Cleitus and Ptolemy banished and thus unable to comment on the idea in retrospect, and Cassander too much the brown noser to ever speak against someone without the intent to create amusement being involved. Arrhidaeus would speak gently against his brother, never enjoying using sharp words against anyone, and Hephaistion would not. It was recognized that Hephaistion had thought that the idea of speaking to the Carian prince to change the son of Philip that he intended to espouse his daughter to, but he had not spoke out. Hephaistion played a game of balancing personal, romantic, erotic interests and intellectual, economic, and political interests. The Carian affair had fallen victim to Hephaistion being willing to woo the father of a potential bride of his lover in his lover’s interest, but not willing to speak that he thought that Phillip would certainly hear of it and take Alexander’s involvement negatively.

Negative reaction to Hephaistion’s involvement with Alexander’s plan had reverberated around the court, much to Hephaistion’s distaste. He might acknowledge that he was involved with Alexander willingly, but he had been unprepared for the whole court to know that he had Alexander’s erotic favor, kept in the court by Philip as hostage against Alexander’s good behavior. It would be an unusual conversation for Hephaistion now with his father Amyntor that did not end in Amyntor needling Hephaistion about his lingering desires for men, inappropriate in a youth now become a young man. Amyntor’s time spent in Athens could be said to influence his views on appropriate erotic expressions, an expression not shared by the Macedonian people. Philip had done many things that certainly exemplified continuous erotic desires for both boys in men, the case in point being the Pausanias case.

“You were involved.” Cassander was back in the argument, not dissuaded from his course of argument. Watching Hephaistion be given that much lee way, when the others who had been neck deep in the intrigues to marry Alexander to the Carian woman had been banished from both Philip and Alexander’s presence was grating. He got to stay in Pella, at the beck and call of Phillip. “It’s perfect, kill off Philip, Caranus hasn’t started walking on his own yet and thus cannot even be recognized to be in the line of succession, not to say a viable heir, Arrhidaeus sides with you in all things Alexander, he would not try and intercede as a potential king. Ptolemy has never even been recognized as the King’s issue,”

“Enough of that!” Hephaistion interceded. “Ptolemy has never been proved to be the son of the King.” He would avoid using Philip’s name aloud, for while he did not believe that saying it aloud would call the attention of the king, as the king was not yet a god, though he’d had himself enthroned as one today. Hephaistion would avoid using Philip’s name aloud for the reason that he had cursed it aloud in vanity as he made a choice that he saw as dubious consent. Was it truly consensual, with his will, if it was Hephaistion’s will that he not die, that Alexander be allowed to come back to Pella. That his father not find out about that question. “And Pausanias had other reasons to kill the King than assassination!”

“He tried to kill the King,” Arrhidaeus tried to understand what the man was saying. Hephaistion made fast connections with small bits of intelligence. “what else would he be but a traitor, an assassin.” The amount of intelligence, no matter its size, that Hephaistion received made him Alexander’s spy master.

“He tried to kill my father,” Alexander was now staring at Hephaistion, Hephaistion noticed, eyes growing dark with anger as gold hair turned to brown in the dark of the room. They hadn’t bothered to light many of the lamps when they had returned from the sickroom. The oil fed lamps were now casting shadows on the walls, and an imaginative mind might see phantasms of heroes, gods, and monsters ranging over the walls, the Odyssey replayed in dark and light against plaster.

“Exactly!” Hephaistion gave in and yelled. The shadows on the wall seemed to coalesce around him for a moment, repulsed by a bright light and then rushing in to fill the space that it had emptied. His voice boomed a bit with the sound of falling hammers against an anvil. “Pausanias tried to kill the King. That does not make him an assassin, an assassin kills a person for reasons of power, money, or another’s erotic or romantic affections. It makes him a man willing to attempt regicide, the killing of Kings. I was here when the king dismissed him from his bed, dishonoring Pausanias’ family. He spoke of it to the court, the King did, whilst you were exiled, details that minds that did not care to inquire did not need to know.” Cassander gasped in air, now remembering the incident in court, and Leonnatus’ eyes darkened with memories of that, his care not for Pausanias’ discontent, or Hephaistion’s anger, but rather for the new understanding of how Pausanias had joined the plotters, who would become enemies once again after the King was dead and it fell to them to further their factions for his replacement. Only Hephaistion noticed that something was off in Leonnatus’ reaction to that, and only because his eyes were watching Leonnatus’ face. Leonnatus, for all he’d sworn allegiance to Alexander had caressed him while Alexander was in Epirus, then in Athens before he returned to the court at the summons of his father, preceded in a few months by Alexander’s mother Olympias. “And then when Pausanias was taken forcibly, and asked for justice, he was placated by the king with a bribe of a position that would more than repay the position lost but not the indignity of being taken against his will.”

“Alexander, what he says is true.” Cassander decided to cede the argument, momentarily backing Hephaistion. Better that Hephaistion actually favor him in some small amount than not at all. It was the same reason that he oiled his hair and combed it carefully before speaking to Barsine outside of Alexander’s chambers, if he were to make the effort to speak with her on his own initiative. It was better to have the favor, Hephaistion knew of Cassander’s thought processes, of Alexander’s bedwarmers than not to. He had not managed to seduce his way into Alexander’s bed yet, and the power that lay in the apex of thighs to convince Alexander, Cassander thought, was stronger in many ways than the power in his blood.

It had not occurred to Cassander that Hephaistion had not seduced Alexander into his bed, that the son of Philip had grasped Hephaistion by the waist one night and pulled him into his bedroll while they were still at Mieza. Barsine had been a well chosen bedmate, her fluency in Persian influencing and completing Alexander’s, her ties to a powerful figure in Persia making her useful in two ways. She was good in bed, and a good potential hostage against her father’s disobedience if Alexander ever ascended the throne or was sent to fight on the Persian front.

If he went to war, they would both follow, one into battle, the other to be a piece of bedroom furniture.

“What of who else could have spoken to him, whispered words of forceful, quick death?” Leonnatus could not resist a last attempt at stirring the pot. His preference for misdirection would not go unanswered as it cried for him to try and ask those around him to let him not notice what he truly thought. “Olympias may have thought to kill Philip.”

“I don’t want you to help in the investigation.” Polyperchon’s eyes were hard on the two body guards standing in front of him. Their brethren were feathered to the sides, as if spread around them both. They were not in any formation, which was unusual except that the guards around one were squaring together, and they avoided the other, blood on his sword tip. “You’ve already mucked things up.”

“The punishment for treason is death.” The other guard stated, a rationalization of the other’s actions.

“The punishment for trying to kill a king may be death,” Polyperchon’s voice was growing louder, the tones of his birth home in Epirus filling his voice as his anger at the pair deepened. “but it is death following suitable questioning. If he would have spoken of collaborators, he cannot anymore, which is my current problem with you both.”

“What do you mean?” A brave guard quailed in the glare of the general’s displeasure, his knees starting to shake as a glare usually turned against enemies or fledgling recruits speared through him. “How could carrying out the law of our land be problematic.”

“They,” he gestured at the two, both with trailing mud and creeping blood on their legs and cloak, the first from the run to chase Pausanias, the former from his death throws. “have effectively named themselves as potential collaborators, named all of you as potential collaborators, whom I must now replace in their duties.”

“Replace?” Another question, this one from a different guard, the clasp of his cloak and the fabric of his tunic naming him as more highly born than his comrade, his loyalty perhaps given by his father to the king instead of the king receiving it directly. A spoilt child just grown to adulthood in Polyperchon’s experience, having dealt with the snobbery that this one had shown some of his lesser born compatriots, and spoken of in regards to those sworn to Philip not born of Macedon. Xenophobia, fear of those different to him, changed to hatred, disdain, and rudeness. “What do you mean, replace? Replace us? All of us?” He’d never not thought the brat not to be intelligent, however. The youth was able to link words spun around him into one weaving of knowledge well, probably from his lengthy experience with his own father’s intrigues. The man was always vying for a higher position, Polyperchon had noticed, and Philip had commented. Keeping the man’s son on as a body guard worked as well as keeping him as a hostage, though he’d been too old to join Alexander and his companions at Mieza, under the tutelage of Aristotle.

“Exactly, Aristoneices.” He enjoyed the flash of surprise over the child’s face, and it’s paler reflections over the other faces. One had a different reaction, and that one would be kept closely in mind. “I have reassigned several members of the Army under my command to new positions. They will be temporarily taking over the dual roles of guarding the King, and doing the footwork for my investigation into the assassination attempt on the King.”

In the whole of the room, one of the larger halls in Philip’s palace, the guards exchanged looks, some anticipatory, some worried. There was a small stipend involved with the position of body guard to the king, a stipend that more than one of them used to support family members with tight finances, as the position fed, clothed, and housed the guards. They did not ride into battle at the side of the king, that was fulfilled by his Companions, but they followed him nearly everywhere. Not into his bedroom or inner chambers of his private rooms, the rooms that he slept with his particular favorites, but certainly they went with him most places.

Without the king, the body guard was a position without meaning, an amorphous form searching for a skeletal system to allow them to walk. This was not the greatest problem to feal with, except that it meant that they suddenly had a large deal of empty time to fill, and potentially lost stability for their families. Other worries were also inherent, the King, Philip, was still in the hands of the doctors, and that meant that he was not certain to survive. Either way, they could be made redundant by these soldiers replacing them in their duties permanently, if they were not called back to the side of the King, or if the King died of the wound inflicted by Pausanias.

It was not a gut wound, almost always deadly to the one injured, but the ribs were not always better for the one wounded. They could breath blood from the knife, or infection could set in, or both, and sometimes death was even a silent killer in a sick bed, the doctors even mystified as why Apollo and Asclepius turned their hands against the one injured.

“So what are we to do?” Themostices asked. His mother was Athenian, and her paternal uncle politically and philosophically influential in Athens. Politically influential and affronted and insulted by Phillip’s ascension to the throne in Macedon, his subsequent unification of Macedon as his nephew’s regent. The final blow was Philip’s power in Greece. Named as hegemon of Greece, Athens now avoided insult to him by giving tribute. Demosthenes hated Philip, hated that the power of an empirically minded democracy had fallen before a nearly absolute monarch. To the theory of history and polity that he ascribed to, monarchy was what civilization had evolved out of and into democracy, not a democracy that had fallen to monarchy as the years turned. “Are you sending us home to our families?”

“No.” Polyperchon had already issued relevant orders, orders that he’d had the body guards here so that they could not intervene in his orders through subterfuge or accident. “I’m keeping you here. In fact, I’m keeping you right here until Helios begins his journey across the sky, cradling the sun and bringing us light, because as we speak, the barracks that you were assigned to are being searched.” At some of the startled faces, he went on to caution them to calmness. “Not for contraband, who am I to care what you drink in your time off duty, only in your time on duty, or letters to lovers whom may not be approved of by your friends or family, but for information or objects relevant to my investigation of Pausanias. All of his things will be removed from the barracks by the time you return to the barracks.”

They would be in a chest in the locked room that he would be basing his investigation from, or that would be the story that they would hear. In reality, the locked room was to be a kind of mask: things would take place there, and that chest would hold some of Pausanias’ possessions, but anything truly relevant would not be there. He would be doing wet work in there, his _hands_ , the soldiers’ hands and his own would be doing bloody work in that locked room, asking certain pointed questions, and then applying pointed objects if needed to encourage them to be more verbose, more accurate, or even to speak in regards to the questions asked. The less pain was used, the more likely the investigation would be to receive needed answers. Often, the more pain involved in an interrogation, the less accurate the answers would be. That was a two fold issue: the pain made the person interrogated more likely to speak to the effect that the pain would cease, and they often did not have the answers wanted, or any answers at all. Also, the pain could fog the mind of the person of whom questions were asked, the answers that they knew forgotten as the pain wracked them.

There was a third issue at heart. Those well trained in espionage and some other tasks were taught another method. Start talking immediately when asked, so that when you end up telling the truth, it was indecipherable among the many lies, even if torture was applied. Polyperchon thought torture a less effective tool than it was touted. Plus, sometimes those interrogated violently died before they talked, and the potential information that they could have spoken to him was lost to the arms of Thanatos and the halls and fields of Hades. Summoning spirits from a medium was both expensive and usually futile. Those who weren’t charlatans often had to resort to fakery when their intercessions, pleas, and bribes of the dead weren’t answered when they made their efforts.

Ship gold to catch pirates, that was more effective.

“You are to return to the barracks at dawn, and sleep.” He stated. “I have every intention of questioning each of you,” Polyperchon would do it, and sleep very little until he had satisfactory answers to his questions, satisfactory both to himself and Philip when he awoke from the doctor’s ministrations. He would not think of Olympias as implicated in this, he could not. For all her tempestuous ways and her guttering lamp of a relationship with her husband, his liege and king, she would be dear to him always. If she was implicated, he would have to report it, to his discontent at the results. “but I will not be doing it immediately, or announcing who will go when.” His eyes saw several fidget. “I should amend that. None of you will be leaving the court until I am satisfied, so please do not try. I can always appeal to an oracle for your answers from Hades, should you try and leave. It would be much less expensive for the King should you stay in place.” Nothing like an appropriately timed threat to remind men of their place in the scheme of things: rather, he was a General, they were body guards of the king, and youths to boot.

A glance to the window, and he saw the peak of the sun shining into the room as the sun’s chariot began its slow ascent into the sky, bringing back some warmth to Aigai.

“Sir?” Eumenes had entered the room. “Olympias is not in her rooms.”

“Dismissed.” Polyperchon snapped at the body guards, making note of Aristoneices sneer at the King’s secretary. This would be addressed with Philip when he awoke, if he was abusive in any form to the King’s secretary it would need to be dealt with. The secretary had the power of the king’s words, and did nothing that was not the king’s discretion. To work against the secretary was to work against the king.

“I went with the soldiers,” they had entered the room behind Eumenes, and the body guards were pushing around them to leave, two soldiers peeling off at a word from Polyperchon to follow them to their barracks. “and we searched the body guards’ barracks. Pausanias’ things have been brought to where you had indicated for them to go.” Polyperchon was smiling at that. “However, nothing seemed especially interesting to our investigation, but I’ll leave that to your discretion.”

“You were speaking of Olympias?” In Epirus, she would not have been tied to stay in the women’s quarters, and she wasn’t here in Macedon, it was just that in the wake of the attack on Philip, it was odd that she could not be found. One option was that she’d had her hand in the attempt on Philip, and had fled, but it was unlikely. She would rather to his knowledge further her son’s ambitions in taking over in the wake of her husband’s death than flee the crime. It would also imply that she had no pride in her attempt. She did nothing without an eye to her pride or her son’s. Pride was honor.

“I’ve checked the shrines, she is not there anymore, though there were offerings made to Dionysus, and Athena.” Eumenes spoke. “Praise be to Athena, shield shaker, for her role in saving the king.” The soldiers mouthed the words that the General and the secretary both spoke. “Lanike is also gone.”

“Have you checked the rooms of her son?” Polyperchon asked. At the negation, he nodded, smiled slightly. “I’ll go with you, attempt to soften the blow to her that her rooms will be searched.”

“Blow?” One of the soldiers asked.

“Olympias has her pride, and soldiers or bodyguards, who so ever it may be that will be searching her room will be in a sense violating her body of thought.” Eumenes chose to explain. “I also have started the list of grievances against our King that you had asked for.”

“That many?” They went through the hallways to Alexander’s rooms, and knocked on the lintel.

“I have had to start on a second scroll.” Eumenes stepped inside, followed by Polyperchon.

“Olympias, Alexander.” Polyperchon nodded to the king’s son, saw the brother there as well. “Arrhidaeus. Olympias, I need to have your rooms searched.”

“I did not think to kill my husband.” A new voice in their argument, and a feminine one. Olympias had changed from her coral diplos to one of a simple grey to go to the shrines after the events of the evening, and the cloak she wore was equally dismal, a brown that was warm if not pretty. There was to her a difference between vanity and a need for physical beauty, she’d rather manipulate her beauty than spend unnecessary effort on keeping something incredibly expensive clean or mended. In other words, the diplos of fine coral cloth, well woven wool would be worn multiple times, but not at all times. She would keep it in storage when there was no event of appropriate need for it. “While I have perhaps longed for his future fall from grace, I would not have had him assassinated at our daughter’s wedding.”

Alexander nodded, satisfied with his mother’s answer. Leonnatus was not, shaking his head and asking another inflammatory question.

“But you would have him assassinated?” Arrhidaeus made to interject, knowing that the woman who had acted in his life as mother after she had died, a victim of being brought along as a plaything while Phillip was on campaign had not the belief in coating a needling tongue with honey.

“I have always thought that war is perilous enough to a man’s life, no matter of their position as king or peasant to destroy a need for assassins.” Her second reason was left unstated. Besides, at this point there was no guarantee that she would have any effect on the throne if Philip died. If she wanted Philip dead, she would have waited until either Caranus was dead, like young children died, or Alexander had been named as heir. Better not to chance her precious son, also a potential death in a war of succession. Philip’s military would not be kind to Pausanias. “The shrines were full tonight, especially the shrine to Apollo.”

“To whom did you and Lanike pray most especially tonight?” Alexander asked, watching Leonnatus, his hair reddened with the blood of his Thracian mother out of the corner of his eye. Leonnatus was not the happiest of customers at the best of times, always picking at nits, trying to find tiny spots of weakness in iron forged in one piece.

Lanike stepped beside his mother as they both entered his room, her hair shorter than the custom among the women, but as she had spent much of his infancy avoiding his grasping hands on the tufts of it, he knew that she had simply never ended her custom of cutting it to her ears and chin. It had created less strain on her scalp, he knew that. Mother’s ear had once held earrings, until Cleopatra had grabbed, not yet two years, but with a strong grip, onto an earring and pulled, slicing through the flesh.

The women moved to a couch, reclining together upon it, their hands stained with the libations that they’d poured. A faint scent of wood smoke filled the room as they shrugged out of their cloaks and sent it through the room.

“Athena,” Olympias answered. “Athena in thanks for her intervention.”

“Asclepius as well, and Apollo for health.” Lanike said quietly, under the next few words.

“So you saw her as well?” Alexander exclaimed. “And she was who I thought she was?” His breath came out in a sharp breath, the white of his tunic still spattered in red. “Grey-eyed Athena, who came to the aide of Telemachus in his search for his father?” He was obviously saw some parallels with Telemachus in this, a search for a father who had yet to name an heir, a kingdom that he would not be able to control if he received it in the event of his father’s absence, a mother unable to define herself without himself or her husband with a growing influence on places that she perhaps had no right to influence upon.

“I saw her.” Arrhidaeus echoed his brother. “Tall for a woman, grey eyes, wearing a cloak that seemed to shimmer with choices. She was there one moment, between Philip and Pausanias, and gone the next.”

“As did I.” Leonnatus echoed. “A sword left untouched at her side, hand-held scales dangling out of her belt, boots on her feet as if she marched to war, not a woman.” He breathed, and was distracted. “But a goddess.”

“I saw her move,” Alexander stated, “and she spoke to me. _Stop! Stop and remember!_ ” he whispered, the words that had rushed through his mind. “Praise be to Athena for her intervention in Pausanias’ attempt to kill Philip, King of Macedon.”

“Praise be to Athena for her intervention in Pausanias’ attempt to kill Philip, Kind of Macedon.” Echoed through the room, words on the lips of each of the men and women, echoing against walls, echoing and bouncing off of sky, smoke, light and darkness, vibrating though the air and stopping.

“ _Athena shield shaker was not the first to actively touch Philip of Macedon, Neoptolemid.”_ Olympias mouthed new words, her eyes watching Hephaistion whose eyes had gone the blue of the ocean below the cliffs of his temple home, the blue of his mother’s eyes when she had spoken of her child two months before was conceived to another priestess at the temple and not known of whom or what she’d spoken that evening when questioned by the High Priestess.

“Blessed be Apollo, lord of prophecy, but not the only god who can speak through mortal tongues of things in the future.” Her eyes went through the room, Lanike’s hand warm in hers, the pulse in her wrist suspended as Leonnatus’ jaw lay suspended and she could spot something green between his teeth. Cassander’s hair was not moving in the early morning breeze, but then again, Lanike had commented to her in the past that Cleitus had commented on it: Cassander’s hair never seemed to move, a shoulder length brown mass that he swore the man greased for beauty and inadvertently caused ugliness with it.

Alexander had yet to blink or comment at his beloved’s new vibrancy of voice, the sound of the surf almost present in the room. In fact, he had yet to speak anything on this change in his beloved, his hand frozen in the air. The moments were not passing, except for the words that Hephaistion’s mouth spoke.

“ _Shaker of shields, Athena intervened in a man once touched by her father, who had the presence of mind to renew the seed of gods in those whose footsteps could echo across Greece and the Earth. She may have saved her father’s son from the shaken shields that could have killed him, but the shields still shake as accusations fly in the court and along the borders those brought under the hand of Philip and Macedon rumble in discontent.”_

Prose was not the usual wording for prophecy of the gods, Olympias knew. However the words of Apollo were spoken by Oracles in verse, often only recognizable as to their form in the retrospect of events. She had heard prophecy spoken before that was in prose, out of a woman taken by the madness of Dionysus, screaming at a fire that she could only see, a fire that three weeks later took her life and the life of her babies.

Nessa had told her that the prophecy given in the Temple of Aphrodite was spoken in prose, and never of events that did not concern the Temple or its devotees in some manner. They were not the Oracles of Delphi, palms reaching out to capture silver and gold to bring words from their lips like the sapphires and rubies that they could not wear but did hoard in their treasuries for others.

“ _Treachery spans a kingdom and an empire, curled up in a king’s bed, spreading legs to create pain and rejecting my gifts. One heir will be betrayed, one heir to Macedon grow stronger as the chaos grows.”_

This was certainly prophecy, a goddess giving what warning she could to one dear to her, though why Aphrodite speaking only to Olympias, whose closest god was Dionysus. If what the prophecy speaking said was true, Zeus’ hand was on Alexander’s fate, and not always did Aphrodite’s support lie with the King of Olympus, first among those who dwelt on Olympus. But a son of her temple was beloved of a son of Zeus, perhaps that was why Aphrodite helped? Olympias watching the blue eyes spinning, hands reaching up to clench against the honey hair and paler skin, green creeping through the blue as Hephaistion began to surface in words, and was forced back from the words left unspoken by Aphrodite. His will must be subservient to hers in this, the prophecy spoken by unwilling prophets were twisted, lies and mistruths slithering past the lips of prophets forced to speak for another of forced to speak by a god. Cassandra’s curse, to speak prophecy and never be believed was her gift for swearing her subservience to Apollo and then rejecting the terms. It would be kept in mind of those who would swear to the gods for a great deal of time, torturing their minds in an effort to create strength out of weakness and to test the belief, the resolve of those who would swear their fealty to the gods.

 _“One heir to Macedon has yet to be born, the blood of gods in his veins. Out of that child the end of an empire could remain upon this earth could be refuted, but that heir may not even have the chance to inherit should Philip not live.”_ Who, which wife would bear another heir to Macedon for Philip? She had gifted Philip with Alexander and Cleopatra, Eurydice with Caranus and her daughter Europa, nearly ignored by the woman. Meda often enjoyed Europa’s company, and was more of a constant in Philip’s bed with the recent birth of Caranus. Perhaps Meda would at last have a child that lives, and Olympias would again have to alter her plans for her son’s ascendance.

“ _Winds have gathered across the sea, not brewed by myself or the breath of anger of Zeus’ brother to shake against the hull of Macedon as thunder born of men and not Zeus growls in the skies around Macedon.”_

The last words echoed away as Hephaistion gasped for air, gasping, eyes full of tears as blue and green retreated, leaving grayish blue in their wake.

A knock was heard on the lintel of the door, and Polyperchon, a familiar face to Olympias entered with an accompaniment of guards.

“Olympias, Alexander.” Polyperchon nodded to the king’s son, saw the brother there as well. “Arrhidaeus. Olympias, I need to have your rooms searched.”


	3. Part Three

The sun was a rosy glow, creeping closer and closer to the land as the day wound to an end, and the golds of the light contrasted with Barsine’s dark hair, nestled into a pile beside Alexander’s chest, her head resting on his pectoral, eyes hooded in the light. They had indulged each other early in the morning, her arrival in a gauzy chiton as his mother had left to stay in her rooms, watch that the soldiers ravaging her rooms for information did no permanent damage.

Her chiton was mixed with his, the light olive color a contrast against her skin resting on it and the white of his ceremonial chiton. Alexander slid a hand down a tawny thigh, the smooth skin catching on his sword calluses as he pressed against her to turn her over. His other hand pressed on her other thigh as he slid down the bed, tangling in their chitons and the bed coverings as he moved. Hand against thigh, he pressed them apart as Barsine smiled lazily at him, a slender hand moving to his scalp as the other traced her breast, swelling up from her chest and out against an arm encircled at the bicep in copper bands. Her nipples were ringed with light bruising, pink against the tea brown of her skin, a relic of the earlier debaucheries. They were tightening again with anticipation as his tanned form slid down, a smirk displaying teeth, reminding her of the lion of her homeland.

Alexander’s hands parted her thighs, pressing her against the bed as the new growth on his chin started to rasp against her skin. Lips against one thigh, he traced the names of heroes against her other leg with his thumb as he pressed upward with kisses. One kiss against the vein visible through her skin, another against the defined line of the muscle of her thigh, a nip against the curve of her ass as he moved towards the crease of her thighs meeting.

A musk infused his nostrils as her body responded to her, the parts that made her woman wetting and warming, slowly inflating in anticipation of what Barsine had felt hardening against her stomach as she slept against his stomach and chest.

He was only mirroring how she’d woken him, undulating her hand down the bedclothes touching her body and his to circle around the hardening part of him. She’d played with the fat head of his cock, circling around with fingertips wet from her tongue, and pinched at the vein underneath, certain of her ability to falsify that she’d woken him with the bite of pain against his cock. Her hand had stroked down his cock to the base, encircling it with her hand, tightening as he’d thrust up and into her hand, and then loosened her hand, moving now that he hardened more to the head again, playing his foreskin as she had eyed the impressive results of her ministrations. It might be thought more beautiful by the Greeks to be small, but her preference was for his large girth and length, a thing inherited of his father’s blood—Barsine had heard.

Her hand had moved to sweep back downward and her wrist had been grasped by his large hand, pulling her arm up and his hand moving to her thigh, the other releasing her arm as he’d moved down the bed, pressing her upward.

“Stay still, Barsine.” Orders were rarely issued to her in bed, but then again she wasn’t his catamite, that grey eyed whore’s son from a temple of Aphrodite. Like the temples at home, the priestesses there opened their legs to strangers in the name of Inanna, the Romans’ Venus, Ishtar, her lover’s Aphrodite. That catamite, the man who while an adult warmed the bed of another man, and indulged in the inferior congress with him took Alexander’s orders in all things.

Her wrists stayed in place, Alexander noted, one hand moving from hovering over his hair. His order would be obeyed in this today, or he would burn her bottom with his hand to remind her why she obeyed him in this. She had gone to her friends in the men from Persia, the women instead of coming to him when Pausanias attacked his father last night. He kept her, not those Persians. His money paid for her food, her place to sleep, the clothes that she bought, the fabrics imported from east of Persia, enticing as they were, they were expensive. He owned her things, and she had bartered herself knowing that her body was the price for such shiny things.

This was what Hephaistion could not give him, Alexander thought, and bit lightly on her mound. She shaved it clean, something that Hephaistion did not have to do, and he licked through the parting of her mound and back into its inner folds. They tasted of him, a taste that he had licked and sucked out of her and of other lovers, and he liked that his spurt had not completely trickled out of her, pooled and soaked into the bed clothes. She tasted lightly of oil, which he wondered at for a moment, but dismissed as his nose brushed against her pearl. If he licked it, she would arch up against the bed, squeal if he sucked or bit upon him, and she would convulse with pleasure should he continue his play with it. His cheeks were staining with her as she grew more slippery, his tongue flattened against that pearl, moving back and forth before abandoning it to encircled the convulsing slit underneath it.

Against his stomach, trapped between the bed and the hard planes from much military practice, his cock slipped between them, it’s tip already oozing in anticipation of finishing itself inside of Barsine. For a moment, Alexander allowed himself to rut against the bed, the friction against his cock bringing him closer to that orgasmic edge. Barsine was making protesting noises at his oral abandonment, but never mind, he thought.

“Lover!” She protested. “Lover, please!”

Her pleasure was perhaps ignored, but her plea was not. Alexander moved his hands from her thighs, placing them on either side of her body as he levered himself up from the bed, slamming his hips forward blindly, bruising against her ass and the second hole closed against him, slipping on that into the hole that welcomed him.

“Alexander!” The wail that Barsine let loose woke Lanike in an outer chamber, her sleep on a divan abandoned as she realized the time and her former charge’s lusty activities. “Alexander!” Lanike folded the blankets down as she slipped off the couch, pushing them to the side as she moved to the fireplace in Alexander’s rooms. A pot of porridge would warm him when he left his carnal bed and faced the rest of the day. The sun shining through the western window slits informed her as to the time, and it would not surprise Lanike if her mistress bustled through the doors and into Alexander’s suite of rooms shortly. “Ishtar, harder, Alexander!” The last ended on a squeal. Embarrassing, Lanike thought. One screamed in bed, murmured, moaned, mewled. One did not squeal like a girl too young to be wed given a pretty ribbon for her hair, unless it was in fear, but that _porne_ was no innocent.

The way was getting more slippery, Alexander noted, and while she was convulsing around him, she was no longer as tight around him as she was once, though that did not surprise him. He gave her a good pounding at least twice a week, closer to five or six times, and while she had the time to tighten, Barsine was no longer a milk faced youth. It did not occur to him that the reason she was not as tight a fist around his cock was that she perhaps was not loyal to one bed, that his cock might not be the only to be welcome in her body.

It was almost time, he could feel the tip of the orgasm, what he’d once heard Hephaistion refer to as the blessing of Aphrodite, brush against the base of his spine. Alexander moved a hand back to his body’s entrance into her body, slipping through the wet of her welcome of his cock into her. Pressed his fingers against her pearl as he pistoned his hips forward, for a moment in mind of Bucephalus covering a particularly fierce mare as her fingernails scratched at his back. Barsine continued pulling him in as her cunt convulsed around him, triggering the wave of the orgasm trailing up his spine.

“Alexander!” His ears rang as he poured his seed from his loins into hers, and for a moment he hoped that it would kindle the spark of a child there. If he could provide an heir…Alexander drifted back to her as she pulled away, a smile on the wet lips, his eyes tracing her tongue as it swept her lower lip.

“Barsine.” He retorted, his voice as raspy as the beginnings of his beard, and he dropped a swift kiss against a sweaty shoulder, sliding against her to pull out of her cunt. His cock was still hard, but swiftly he could feel the onslaught of softness, and his eyes caught the light of afternoon through the western window slits, reflecting off the drops of cum on his cock.

Heavy boots echoed into his ear, and a familiar voice echoed into his bed chamber.

“Good evening!” Alexander reached for the cloth of his bedclothes, wiping off his softening cock. He did not want his mother to see him still dripping of sexing a woman, though he knew she had seen his quiescent cock in the past. Olympias, after all, had birthed him, pressing his body out of hers and into the world. “Out of bed!” His mother was now standing across the room, her eyes tracing his body searching for weaknesses, glancing at a still wet Barsine with disdain.

“You wished to speak to me?”

“Good evening!” Alexander’s mother’s voice was strident, not that much of a change for her. The change was that following her sandalled footsteps the heavy fall of boots echoed. Olympias was accompanied back to his rooms by the same soldiers who had accompanied her from them, a return to her room so that they could be searched with her presence hopefully moderating any clumsiness. To her, it had been an effort in vanity as one of her pots of facial dye had shattered against the tile of the floor. If it had not been incredibly lacking in expediency, she would have verbally shredded them. As it was she had bruised several egos and her dear friend was no longer speaking to her. Apparently asking about his indelicacies with her undergarments was taboo. Or perhaps accusing him of molesting them was? “Out of bed!” She shouted, her voice echoing against the wall, caught in the tapestries hung against them, the vibrations halted by wool.

Behind her the boots stopped, as she entered the bed chamber of her son, an eye braced against human idiocy scouring his body and dismissing the Persian woman with a glance. Barsine was her son’s choice in bed mate, not her choice for him. She had loudly verbalized her distaste for her to her fellow wives, and even within the ears of Barsine or her close intimates. The woman was no problem for her Persian ancestry, the woman was an issue for her discretion. In some ways a concubine was a wife were her children to be recognized as an heir of her keeper’s loins. Barsine seemed to flirt with many men, and Olympias’ sources could not ascertain if the sloe eyed woman might not dally with all whom expressed interest.

“You wished to speak to me?” Oh, her son sounded smug, and from the heat radiating from the Persian whore’s body, he deserved to be. Looked like his father, that smirk in the wake of sexing, a challenging look in their matching blue eyes.

“The soldiers that ransacked my rooms are to do the same to yours, now.” Olympias sneered at the Persian woman, Barsine’s hand going to the olive chiton, gauzy against her son’s white tunic. That tunic was the same tunic as he had worn to the wedding the night before, and he had probably tumbled the woman into his bed, exhausting his worry in her body so he could sleep, then rousing his mind by pounding his release into her this morning. Boy was like his father, and she had some fond memories of tangled legs and her hands in his hair, her hair in his as they’d coupled.

The olive chiton was pinned back in place, and Olympias watched her son move to the clothes chest at the wall next to the alcove of his bed, proud in his nudity. He opened it, bent to pick out a tunic. His choice of a brown homespun tunic did not surprise him, as his preference for warm cloth of plain color made an appearance. The pins he used to secure it were the tiny snakes she remembered giving him when he was barely old enough to drink wine, and he smiled at her as he stood and followed her out into the main rooms.

“Porridge, Master Alexander?” Lanike verbally questioned but physically pushed a ceramic bowl into his hand with a piece of bread. She had been his nurse many years before, and while her brother was of an age with him, she felt no compunction to kowtowing. He was a babe who’d pulled her hair until she cut it out of his reach, even if now what he pulled was his lover’s hair, an sword from a sheath.

“Thank you Lanike.” His eyes were on the soldiers, however, and not his old nurse. “Mother informs me that you are to search my rooms for anything tying me to the attack on Father, or anything else of potential use?” Alexander watched the man who stepped forward to answer.

“The General,” A raised eyebrow from Alexander ordered him to continue as to that. “Polyperchon, sir, he ordered us to search your quarters in the wake of the Lady Olympias’ quarters.” Alexander nodded. “You may remain here to observe.” Olympias squawked from across the room, she’d had to insist on watching to remain!

“Your name, soldier?” Alexander heard the fall of a footstep behind him, half turning to see Barsine emerge from his bedchamber, her hair tumbled around her shoulders, a dark mess as she pressed against his chest. His arms reached out, gripped her arms above the arm bands he’d bought her, copper rings, and pressed his lips down against hers before pushing her away, letting her go towards the door.

“Cleisces, sir.” Barsine heard the answer to Alexander’s question as she left his apartments, moving down the hallway and away from the rooms. Her thoughts were already on getting to her rooms and cleansing them, but first to warn her co-conspirators. She was but a concubine, her room would not be searched until her more royal compatriots’ rooms were searched, and Barsine did not want to be implicated in this by another person involved. 

Thankfully her name was not known to all involved, and Pausanias could no longer speak to her actions. She had worn a chiton with the illusion of modesty, the shadow of her cunt in its folds, the rose of her nipples pressing through the cloth and be brushed against him as she’d reinforced some of the offers against him. Barsine could not help but ponder if she could not use that on Alexander to bend him to her will, his actions of this morning…Barsine bounced off the pelvis of another person, a harder torso pressed against her breasts as she looked up, air only against the cloth now.

“Hephaistion!” It was not a squeak of surprise, she would maintain, if anyone asked Barsine. Faced with the man who performed her lover’s intelligence issues while contemplating using her body to sway Alexander’s mind was not without the potential of his uncovering duplicity. He also shared their lover’s bed, his knees chafed from his worship of Alexander’s cock displayed to the world by his tunic. “I’ve taken care of Alexander already!”

“I’ve taken care of Alexander already!” Hephaistion was stumped. For all his conversations with his lover’s concubine could be filled with spite on her part, this was a non sequitor in their conversation that made little sense. Other than…sex. Alexander’s taste for sexing was high, and his lust had to be slaked twice daily before he would truly think to include anything creative in his sexing of another. He would be patient, but there would not even be kissing until his loins spent themselves even once. It could be physically trying, and it was one reason that he could not bring himself to jealousy over Alexander’s multitude of other lovers.

“Thank you.” Indeed, he saw her eyes fill with anger that she kept out of her voice, but Hephaistion was indeed thankful. He would have given Alexander his body should he ask for it, but to him he would rather not after the argument he had just left with his Father. Amyntor was not temple raised, and had spent far too much time in Athens to be permissive of the Macedonians’ rather more lax sexual and romantic practices. Apparently the man thought the scrapes on his knees from helping move the King to the Palace were from his mouth being roughly used, and Hephaistion couldn’t stand that blasé distaste of him, of his lover. “How was he?”

“Quite demanding.” Not surprising, Alexander had nearly lost his father the day before, and that was not the most kind of experience. Alexander used sexing to alleviate stress, to bolster himself, to prove things, all this Hephaistion had realized. A bruise was peeking out of the arm of her chiton, and Hephaistion’s hand went to the line of his scalp where a bruise matching that edged out of his hair, a tiny bit of scab edging it. “He enjoyed me,” A smirk crossed her face, “and I enjoyed him until he was done, softening inside me.” He could not help but wonder why the woman thought he was her rival, the gifts of Aphrodite were spread as they were, and much as he loved Alexander, his lover could love many, and did. “Where are you returning from?”

“Amyntor summoned me.” She smiled, and it spread through her face but not her eyes. “You are headed to your rooms?”

“Yes. Olympias came to Alexander’s apartment with soldiers, apparently they had orders to search his rooms.” Hephaistion heard the disdain for Olympias in the sneer in her voice and the lack of appropriate title for the Lady Olympias, a lack of title that had come when Olympias had lost the title of Queen and a dishonor that she had never let on to the woman who left few to not know that she had great distaste for her son’s concubine. “I need to get to my rooms,” She pressed past him, her hands pressing on his shoulders as she went by without problem. Barsine was almost a head taller than him. “I’ll see you around.”

“He failed!” Eurydice was inconsolate, her hair wild around her head and shoulders, the handmaid that stayed with her, her former nurse not cowering, but physically braced against her charge’s tantrums. This was not the first squealing fit that she’d seen of the younger woman, a girl really, barely seventeen and her breasts finally rounding out from puberty rather than nursing. There was a wet nurse for that usually, Barsine knew, but Eurydice had produced milk for her son and was suckling her son. “That mewling man, the coward failed. And now Caranus is no closer to his rightful place than the bastards.”

For a moment, Barsine wondered if the woman child realized what she was saying and to whom. She was one of ‘those bastards’’ mistress, and one of the men in the sitting rooms of Attalus’ family at Aigai was related to the same man through his mother’s sister, by marriage. That so-called bastard was through whom she had her influence.

“Is this truly a bad thing?” One of the ambassadors asked. “We all saw Athena, no?” His people were of red haired Thrace, known horse masters. Athena was not beloved of them as she was of the man next to him, a pale faced man with hair cut short and a forgettable mien. He was Athenian, yes, a man of negotiable services. For the right price, he was someone’s man, and recently he had been bought by a man with connections to an Athenian orator, Barsine knew from her manager in this affair.

“Your goddess interfering,” The speaker shared her own hair luster and curve of nose, his skin dusky with a color that the sand was thought to engender in its peoples. “is no affair of ours. It says merely that both my gods and yours are watching the events of the next few weeks. Your King Philip may yet die, whether of his wounds or new wounds. A man in the care of doctors drinks many things, and not all of them heal every man. Some of them are even deadly if too much is given.”

“Poison is a coward’s tool.” The man of Epirus stated. “Or rather, it is a snake’s tool, someone who will be looked upon especially closely. My lady Olympias knows the truth of this, as but the rumor of it’s singular usage plagues her all these days.” My lady Olympias, indeed, Barsine snickered lightly. Olympias had no compunction against the use of poison, but she would never be so light in wisdom as to get caught in its use. The disdain that her patron’s mother showed against her had meant that she took few meals that weren’t of the general meal hall or accompanying Alexander.

Barsine would not poison the man who gave her power, as Olympias had the same thoughts, she would not do the same. It simply made no sense. “However it is done, it must be finished.” Leonnatus this time. She smiled at the man, her eyes deepening. He’d come to her with a shared wish for greater influence on their future king, and in fact a greater influence that he would become a future king. “Pausanias failed, we must figure out why and counter it, and make sure that a second attempt follows through.”

Attacles stepped back from the door into the sitting room, his eyes wide as his ears perked. His cousin’s voice was a surprise, she had not returned to their rooms since he’d accepted little Caranus from her arms and Europa had curled around his legs and hugged against him. Her eyes had been wet, and Attacles remembered looking to Eurydice’s eyes for her comfort of her daughter, but she had rushed into her rooms, Harmodia following on her mistress’ sandals and rushing to the clothing chest, pulling out a chiton and a cloak. He’d only seen the swirl of Eurydice’s bright skirts as she’d rushed out, and now she was back in his father’s rooms with other people?

“He failed, isn’t that simple enough?” Attacles heard. “He was meant to stab the old man and sliced him instead, and now Uncle won’t make me Queen.”

‘Uncle won’t make me Queen?’ Attalus, Father, Attalus, Attacles’ would rather call the man. It was inappropriate to call the man who had introduced you to carnality directly by his title of Father to oneself. Attalus wished to make himself King Regent of Caranus? This was no surprise to Attacles, it had been the only reason that he could understand his father taking in a mewling seven year old girl-child when her parents had died, to make an alliance of their bloodline to a great bloodline, greater than their own, and Phillip liked pretty things, that was well known to those who knew such things.

“He failed,” That voice was equally feminine, but the heavier accent on the language was not familiar to him, other than it was foreign, barbarian. “because he allowed jealousy to trump his sanity, his comfort. Being kept is pleasurable, thus being jealous is inappropriate. He was gifted with appropriate recompense, and spurned it, and his rage at being punished was uncalled for. Pausanias was an idiot, and his jealousy clouded his decisions.”

Pausanias had been old for Father’s tastes. Attalus’ tastes, and Europa was murmuring in his arms, waking at the female voice, gnawing at his tunic with her few teeth. Attacles moved a thumb into her mouth, better that she gnaws that than put holes in his tunic. Soon enough he would need to find something to place in her mouth to alleviate her gnawing and soreness. More teeth were coming, he could see the white winking through the red gums when she smiled at him, and in his cradle, Caranus turned over, cuddling against the fluffy toy that he’d dropped into the child’s arms.

Pausanias’ punishment had echoes of his father’s punishments, and father would certainly be, Attalus would certainly be displeased with the events that had transpired in his absence on the front line against Persia.

“How do we try again?” Attacles crept forward, spying through the cloth obscuring the entry out of the nursery and into the sitting room. From his vantage point he could see the speaker, a man with a Persian beard and dark hair, curved nose and dark eyes, dark skin that spoke of places on the other side of the Hellespont to him. “There is no easy person to blame this on. Pausanias was simple, his jealousy turned to rage at the intimations of Philip ordering his use by Attalus and his party. It was easy, and I’m sure we could use the same on Amyntor’s catamite son.”

The man’s accent matched the unknown female speaker earlier, and Attacles realized that they shared a nationality of Persia, probably members of the Persian ambassador’s staff.

“Never mind that,” This speaker was in a red cloak, clean shaven, probably around Attacles’ own age. After Alexander and his companions had started shaving their cheeks clean even having reached adulthood, it had become a trend among those young in Philip’s court, a minor rebellion against their fathers’ generation. “if you keep on playing with the man’s name, the gods will let him know what we speak of.”

“Leonnatus, you speak nonsense.” An Ionic accent this time. “He’s nothing special. Athens has a man willing to pay for the death of Philip. My patron wishes the King of Macedon, the hegemon of a democratic city dead, fast.”

“You mean Demosthenes will pay for an assassin.” The man, Leonnatus was known to Attacles for other reasons. He was one of Alexander’s companions, sworn to his service. “If Athens pays for an assassin to kill King Philip, Hephaistion will hear it, and Alexander will report it. A transaction of that length of time to take place and amount, the Prince Alexander’s spymaster would hear of it.” Alexander had no knowledge of this plotting done partially in his name? It was perhaps then doomed to trouble, for if the son of Philip disapproved, he had inherited his father’s expediency in dealing death.

“He won’t hear of it!” The Persian woman interjected, loud and distasteful for the man. “He’s but Alexander’s toy.”

“A toy he may be to you, but he has only one loyalty, to Alexander. You are lucky that he has yet to hear of your bed wandering, woman!” Leonnatus again yelled. “Still your tongue against those who could have stood against our plans.”

“Both of you, stop screaming!” Eurydice’s voice was still as loud as the arguers’ voices were loud, and worse to Attacles, shrill. Of course she’d yet to reach her physical adulthood, even if she did bleed. “You’ll wake Caranus.” Like she cared for her son, this being the first time since she’d given him Caranus whilst she pandered to the fellow wives’ good will and Philip’s good wishes and return to her bed when he rose from her sickbed if he was not dead first. If she was ignored, Attacles knew that Meda, the Thracian wife of Philip was not, and she was the adult of body and mind, never indulged by her father in things that Attalus let the woman child get away with. She was still attended by her nurse, had never learnt of woman’s things, and the scream when her sheets stained with blood had been a welcome reprieve from Father’s attentions. It was too much, he thought at times, to pay for the privilege of being his father’s heir.

“Then we should end this,” the voice was new in the conversation that Attacles had both heard and understood. He liked Caranus and Europa, and when she’d woke him from sleep with a pull against the covers of his bed, he’d risen and slid through the door between the nursery of the rooms they’d claimed in Aigai for the family and his bed chamber. He’d hidden the door with what he thought to be cleverness, and made sure that his father was not adjoining the rooms. Attalus’ tastes had never run to girl children, and Caranus was still in arms, but he would rather not think on that. In the least, Eurydice had remained unused in Father’s home, but her use would have meant a loss of potential prestige for Attalus. “leave now, with a decision.”

“I’ll have something done.” Two voices spoke at once, Leonnatus and the Persian woman, whose name he had yet to realize. As the group in the sitting room dispersed, Attacles lowered Europa into her bed, covering her body in it’s tiny night shift with a woven blanket, something that he’d dug out of a carton of his mother’s things for him, packaged in the wake of her death by Herais, his nurse and his mother’s handmaid. It was dark blue in the faint lamplight of the sitting room, and he slipped back into his bed chamber, closing the hidden passage behind him.

“Who’s my little king?” He could hear Harmodia coo. “Yes, you are adorable little one.” In his own chamber, he unpinned his tunic, pulling the folds around him as he sunk onto his bed, curling into even more blankets as the chill of the night air of Aigai snuck into his room through the windows that he had neglected to shutter.

“Gods.” The exclamation was hardened, more of a curse than anything else, and it drew Meda’s attention from her spinning, the spindle in her hands stuttering to a stop as she saw her husband’s eyes opening, well one eye opening and the eye socket next to it rippling as the muscles around it reflexively strained to open an eye no longer there. “Pausanias!”

“That’s right.” Philip’s eyes darted out around the room, eyes going to the familiar tapestries masking the walls, the gauzy window coverings and the bedroom furniture. Modest Meda was sitting on one of the couches, pulled close to his bed, a spindle dropping through her hands and onto her lap of cloth. The peplos was the same as she’d worn to the wedding, but her eyes were smudged dark as well as their usual darkness, her smile at his speech taut against graying skin. “He stabbed you, probably aiming for your gut, but,”

“But Athena,” He put the pieces together in his head, the words in his mind still echoing. His gut hurt, a steady ache when he attempted to breathe erased when he ceased breathing for a moment. “Athena was there, and her hand grasped against his ribs, and he missed. But I still bled.”

_Stop._ He’d heard those words. Athena had spoken into Philip’s mind, and he could certainly think that she had spoken into other minds. Pausanias’ eyes were wide as she’d moved, but that could have been shock at the interference.

“What else do you remember?” Meda asked, and Philip let his eyes trace her familiar body, the heavy curve of her breasts under the peplos pressing against the fabric. The long swords of the twin pins that held up her peplos were visibly sharp, different from the pins that she’d used to secure the peplos she’d worn rising from his bed and gathering together her clothes for her return to her rooms and preparations for the day. He’d smiled at her leaving, his cock flaccid against his thigh from her farewell ministrations, imagining the rounded stomach bulging with a child, one that would not be lost in her expectancy, her hips swaying in unconscious melody as she stepped through the door. “Philip.”

“I left three marks on each of your hips when you left in the morning.” He watched her blush at his crudity, purposely said in a tone of voice that he’d noted had an effect on her in the past.

“What my Lady Meda meant,” a male voice familiar to Philip spoke, “King Philip, is what else do you remember of the stabbing attempt?”Apollocles, that was the name. the man was both heavily devoted to Apollo and Asclepius and a serious student of medical study. He would rather not rely wholly on prayers for the end result of a healthy patient but utilize the gifts given mankind by the gods.

_Stop._

“Athena, she grabbed Pausanias’ wrist. The knife would have stabbed into my gut, and it would not have been a heart wound, but those gut stabbed die with the same certainty as those stabbed in the heart.” _Stop._ “The knife went to my chest instead, slicing and stuttering,” _Stop,_ he heard again, still ringing through his mind. “and then she was gone, and Pausanias was running. The world was screaming around me. Alexander, my son was there, his hands pressed against the wound, and my vision was going dark.”

“That’s wholly accurate.” Meda acknowledged, her eyes still dark to the world and focused on him.

“What else happened?” Philip asked, watching the doctor and his wife. “Where are my other wives, my generals, my son?”

“I cannot give you a complete answer,” Apollocles was clearly attempting to avoid answering, and then fully admitted it. “However, Polyperchon and Antipater are handling the investigation, I think.”

“I want them here. Now.” The King spoke, and then heard the words again. _Stop and remember._

“You’re not dead because Hephaistion had the presence of mind not to let Alexander go into shock.” Antipater stated bluntly. “You were bleeding out on the sands of the theater, he used his cloak and hands to staunch the bleeding, and made your son’s request of a doctor happen. You were moved to the palace at his order, and Apollocles met us there.”

“Amyntor’s son is certainly something.” Slender hips and hairless body even as an adult, quiescent in his bed. Alexander would kill him if he knew, and both the boy and Philip were not going to tell Alexander of Philip’s use of his son’s _pet_. “What of Pausanias?” Meda was biting her lip, and Philip thought momentarily of biting in bed, making her gasp beneath him. “Has he talked?”

“Pausanias is dead.” Polyperchon stated. “One of the guards that chased him decided to enact the legal punishment for regal assassination and treason. I’ve had the bodyguard officially stand down, searched their barracks, and confiscated his possessions.”

“He was praying _for Justice_ when he tried.” Philip recounted, eyes on his two generals. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Pausanias had some writings in his trunk, things that lead me to certainty that while he may have wanted justice for some perceived injustice,” Polyperchon stated. “he may not have been the only person involved. I’ve started doing searches on persons with acknowledged grudges past or present against you.”

“Who have you searched?” Philip had a bad feeling about this. “Olympias, most likely. But she wouldn’t try right now.”

“I know.” Polyperchon stated. “I’ve had Alexander’s rooms and Arrhidaeus’ rooms searched as well, but I was going to cease the searches for the day, let the guards I’ve had searching get some rest before exchanging them with the shifts that have been guarding you.” Philip was nodding, but he heard a soft voice say something next.

“I want my rooms down next, and then my King Philip’s rooms done.” Three sets of eyes went to her, Apollocles having ducked out. “I want us to check for any especial danger to my King in his rooms. If it was assassination, could poison in his clothing or such treachery not be the next step. I also think that if it is seen as happening to the whole court it will be less traumatizing to the court.”

“To the court?” Antipater questioned.

“She means, to me.” Polyperchon stated. “Making less people rebel against or complain about soldiers molesting their things if even the King’s things have been molested by those who are fingering possessions in search of things indicating danger.” He was laughing at the statement. “Meda, far too many people underestimate you.”

“OLympias does not.” Meda’s smile was different and new to Philip, who had never seen her smile with such prominent teeth in his bed, instead favoring a smile with a curl of pleasure in the cheeks, sensuality nipping at him in her eyes. “She made much fuss not to hide any guilt, Polyperchon, but rather to create more of a furor around herself. She may be worried that her son might have a hand in this, or one of his without his knowledge, which is more likely.”

“Enough on the mother of my oldest son. What of the mother of my youngest son?”

“Eurydice retired to her rooms only just after the sun set to change her clothing and see to the babe.” Meda’s eyes had returned to Philip, and he wondered at her for a second. “You woke within moments of her departure.”

“I want her here.” He was smiling, thinking of that lithesome woman, finally of health to return to his bed, her willing smile being one of the things he had last seen before he’d begun the entrance into the theater. “You two are to be as you were before I awoke, but I want Eurydice here.”

_Stop and remember._


	4. Part 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ah, the sheep are back. There's something important about the sheep being back. I need to look that up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not authorized to be posted anywhere but on An Archive of Our Own for the moment.
> 
> It has returned to my queue of works in progress, and may be edited for clarity as well.

“You want him dead, but you want to live, correct?” Barsine had to confirm her assumptions regarding this. Leonnatus was not akin to greasy Cassander who believed that appropriate words and a smile of lies would affirm his answers from another person, and they would answer in his bed. Leonnatus was not her favorite of her lover’s companions either, that given to Ptolemy who shared her brother’s skin tone and had a sharp mind paired with common sense. Leonnatus often did not allow reasonable paranoia to affect grand ideas. Her involvement with convincing Pausanias into their conspiracy had dealt with his paranoia, and utilized his acknowledgement that he would not survive the encounter. Pausanias did not believe that he even needed to survive the encounter, that creating the death of Phillip would actualize his need for justice, and that would be enough to satisfy him.

“Correct.” Barsine knew that this would be more difficult to plan than the suicide that Pausanias enacted in his attempt at regicide. “I thought poison would be effective.”

“My maid told me that they have searched the King’s quarters for dangers to him, and that they will be searching every room in the palace. It is going to be harder to poison the king now after Pausanias botched his attempt.” For Ishtar’s sake, she did not wish to die if Leonnatus was caught in his attempt, and she would not fool herself to think that he would or could avoid giving up secrets. “General Polyperchon has also questioned all of the bodyguards.”

“Is not one of ours among the bodyguards?” Leonnatus’ eyes were wide, and under the red hair and the tan she could see him graying in fright.

“As we are not dead, I will assume that he did not speak of his silencing of Pausanias. He was one of the two who gave chase, stabbed him dead to ensure he could not be taken and questioned.” Barsine hoped he would take the bait.

“You mean that if I am caught…” the coward trailed off, and Barsine reminded him of the truth of his situation.

“One of us will ensure you do not talk.” She would rather he do it himself, less mess for her to involve herself in. Attalus was not here to take up the rest of a leader’s duties, Lady-Queen Eurydice had no stomach for violence, and the ambassadors were friends only in fair weather, save her friend in Darius’ service.

A familiar cough echoed out of the covered walkway and into the garden in which they were conversing, the coughing continuing as Leonnatus’ and Barsine’s heads swung to see their prince’s dark haired brother continue on his path through the walkway.

“Gods.”

“Dymenes,” Hatred of a family member was nothing unusual to his family line, life and research had taught Attacles. He had learned to place more of his trust in carefully chosen retainers than in his father’s power mongering manipulations, and Dymenes was one of his first chosen trustees. Dymenes was an Athenian exile and was officially Attacles’ secretary. Attacles utilized the well taught young man as valet, confidant, and right hand in managing the more mundane parts of his father’s estate, Attalus constantly neglecting the base of their power in the interests of using that power to generate the option of more. an example of this distraction had been the loss of a year of young lambs to illness due to his inability to return the letter sent to Attalus from his man in the town. Attacles had stepped in that year, the year that Attalus had dangled Eurydice into the King’s bed and married her to him while she thickened with her first child, darling Europa, and he had started on the path that led to him now managing the whole of their families legitimate sheep trade. Attalus would not let him tocuh the imported goods or the exports that Attalus did in trade for them, and it led Attacles to think that perhaps it was not a wholly approved business. There were some things that would generate a large amount of money for a relatively small size or weight. Dye was legal, if at times strictly controlled. However, other herbs were not entirely approved by the King to be given in trade. “I need information.”

They were standing in the nursery, Caranus curled in a ball in the lines of Attacles’ tunic, his tiny fists gripping his ‘uncle’s’ clothing tightly, tiny nails pressing crescents into the fabric as his sleepy face scrunched and released. Caranus was nuzzling against his uncle’s pectorals, trying to look for the giving flesh of a woman’s breast and a nipple providing dinner. Thankfully there were no teeth yet, Attacles reflected, or his chest would more than itch at the gnawing, instead perhaps bruises blooming under a hungry mouth.

Europa was sitting on Dymenes’ lap, her hands full of a tiny spindle dangling from her hands as she sloppily attempted women’s crafts. Neither men knew how to correct her flubs, the yarn she spun fuzzing around it, and a doll was held in Dymenes’ hand hopes that Europa would ignore the spindle and take the doll from him. It would be bloody should she misuse the spindle, Attacles had remarked upon seeing her with it, and had insisted that they pause their plans for the day, watch the children more closely. For a man, Attacles liked the presence of his niece and nephew, and Dymenes had kept his opinions on this abnormality in his master’s behavior silent.

Dymenes thought that it might be protective of Attacles, attempting to ensure the childhood that was raped of him, that was still molested by the head of household. At times he was rather comforted personally by his realization that the perversions of Attalus did not spread to those fully adult or those of any ‘natural’ subservience to him. The man wanted to create subservience, not reinforce it.

“Information involving? Your cousin is in her second day at Philip’s bedside, Lady Meda has yet to leave and this would be the fourth day shortly since the injury, Lady Olympias has been oddly silent, I still don’t have the name of the Persian woman in here speaking with those who came into your rooms earlier, two days ago.” Dymenes’ voice sounded as if he were pulling together air to start running through the information that he had that he could display. It could, would, might take a great deal of time to go through, Dymenes held a great deal of information in his mind for the discretion of his master.

“Information regarding a wet nurse.” Caranus found something that to him must resemble the normal dispensary of his dinner, and Attacles gently pushed his finger between the tooth free gums and his nipple, detaching the babe in search of dinner. “Caranus is hungry, my cousin has not returned to the apartments, one does not go before our King Philip unsummoned whilst he is still in his sick bed, the guards apparently do not take kindly to it.” Dymenes followed Attacles’ eyes to the babe in his arms, lips pursed and cheeks concave as he attempted to pull milk from bone, flesh, and blood. “Caranus is not as pleased with the goat’s milk that we attempted as hoped. He wishes dinner in truth. He keeps on trying on me for dinner, which does not allow him nutrition as I have nipples without udders.” The last bit echoed between them as amusement burst through. Two men babysitting a young girl child and a babe in arms, struggling to feed themselves while dealing with their contrary charges, it was the making of a comedy played in the theater to remind men of the respect due to women for their great work in the service of the _oikos_.

“That’s simple enough.” Dymenes stuttered through the laughter. “I’ve,” cough. “already,” cough, laugh. “spoken with,” he broke out again in full laughter when he saw Caranus distinctly reject his uncle’s fingertip as an acceptable remedy to his earlier goals, and dive his nose towards his uncle’s chest, biting at the tunic and the nipple underneath, rigid from its earlier abuse. “the kitchens.”

“Oh?” This time Attacles detached the nipple and gave Caranus his thumb instead, keeping a hand splayed underneath the babe’s head to avoid the potential attempts to come. “Why the kitchens?”

“One of the women there who works with the bakery had a baby recently, and has carried the little one around as she’d delivered food on request. I asked if they would send her up today for us to ask her to wet nurse Caranus.”

“Did she say yes?” Attacles tipped his hand, moving Caranus’ head and torso so that his whole body faced towards him. “Are you going to eat dinner?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a woman slip into the room. They were in a secondary sitting room, sprawled between his bedroom and his father’s bed chambers, reserved for his father’s use when his father was in Aigai, but his preferred chamber to review necessary work in when his father was on tour. The main sitting room led into the women’s quarters’ main area, the nursery aligned with his bed chamber and Eurydice’s bedchamber on the alternate side of the main area. They were in one of the more plush suites, and the women’s main area and this second sitting room both had wide doors that opened into the large courtyard at the center of the Aigai palace. “Yes, you’re going to eat dinner, aren’t you?”

It was late enough at night that they’d lit lamps in the corners of the room, and some of the light in the room was supplied from the fires in the central courtyard, fires that would not gutter out while the king was in residence, used for ease of cooking and domestic preparations.

“Unca Dym?” Europa tugged at Dymenes’ cloak, dropping the spindle on the couch. “Why you have dolly?” She asked, her eyes on the sewn rag doll. It wasn’t well created, but it had been a gift for her from among Attacles’ mother’s things. She held it tight at night, her arms squeezing out the rags bundled inside of it, the black eyes sewn under black hair bulging as the stuffing underneath was displaced by her grip upon it. “Can I have dolly back? We need to go back to bed.”

“You need to go back to bed?” Dymenes asked, exagerattedly, and the woman who had ducked through the door out into the courtyard answered him when he lost the grip on Dolly as Europa grabbed at her.

“It’s two hours past sun down, Dymenes.” She had a quiet voice, and the babe wrapped in a sling tied around her waist and over her shoulder moved against her body, settling more deeply into the warmth that she offered. “It is likely her bed time.”

“Dymenes, care to introduce me to your friend?” Attacles watched his secretary’s blush at the young woman in the room, his eyes on the babe in the sling. He wondered for a moment if the babe would have the nose that made his secretary so distinctive, and if they were such friends, why they were not married, then realized the answer to that. Slaves of two households could marry, but only with the consent of their masters. He had not owned Dymenes when the child was conceived, at the least, and he had never been owned as a general slave of the king, rather he had been owned by another aristocrat of the court. It would not have happened. Could not happen.

“Dikenais, my master Attacles, master Attacles, Dikenais. Her babe is called Dymenecles.” Dymenes indicated. “Dikenais, the little master in arms is Caranus, the little mistress is Europa. Europa, Caranus, meet Dikenais.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” It was clear to Attacles that Dikenais was surprised by the enunciation of Europa, but it had been something that his nurse had drilled into his head, and he had chosen to emphasize in what he taught his niece and nephew. They were to be polite to anyone who they met, a lesson that his mother had learnt following the death of her sister at the hands of an angry concubine. It had resulted eventually in the death of the concubine, but Attacles agreed with the view. “mistress Di-nais.” Europa could not yet manage that hard ‘k’ syllable, which Attacles thought adorable but potentially an insult to one person or another. “Uncle Ta-les!” It could be worse, he had particularly avoided being called any derivative of his father’s name by his neice. “Bed-time!”

“So it is.” He lifted Caranus up, held out a hand to Europa, who wrapped her hand around it and hopped off Dymenes’ lap. He walked forward, slow enough that Europa could keep up, expecting Dymenes and Dikenais to follow him. Through the sitting room, out into the main room, into the women’s quarters, and back into the nursery.

Europa let go of his hand, her bare feet slapping against the floor as she skipped over to the bed, hopping up and sweeping her legs under the blankets, curling her arms do that dolly was clenched to her chest. She was already drifting, an ability to sleep that he wished for as he heard Dymenes and Dikenais join him, Dymenes’ hand on the sling. A brush of a kiss to Europa’s head, and he stood, his eyes catching on the long pins on the table next to the bed. Tiny sheep graced their heads, gifts from his father to Eurydice at her first bleeding, her first sign of true usefulness to the family.

“Dymenes, did you see Eurydice return?”

“No, why?” He came around his master, Dikenais entering the room, walking to the tiny cradle.

“Snake!” The shout was unexpected, and Dymenes grabbed Caranus as the babe was shoved at him, Dikenais stumbling back from the crib as her lover’s master lunged towards the crib, his hand grasped around something the length of her arm, his belt suddenly holding an empty sheath as he pushed her away from the crib.

One hand went fast to the neck of the snake, the other holding the dagger going out and around the snake, then jerking back towards him, the bottom of the snake dropping to the floor as he released the snake’s hold on life.

“Dead snake now.” Attacles’ eyes were on the snake as he opened his hand. He’d pulled the snake’s head upwards, uncurling it from a sleeping ball in his nephew’s crib, beheading it. “GUARDS!” He shouted, knowing that there would be someone in the courtyard. “SNAKE IN THE PRINCE’S CRADLE!” He shouted. “GUARDS!” He could hear the sound of the soldiers running now, but his eyes were back on the peplos pins. “Dymenes, those pins weren’t there this morning, and they are Eurydice’s.”

“She wouldn’t kill Caranus.” Dymenes quickly refuted.

“All I will say is that it is timing that would be interesting to the gods, and probably the truth is only known to the gods. Those weren’t here an hour ago when Europa was picking up her spindle and we picked up the dolly.”

“There was a very good reason that Aigai has been declared a sealed town by order of the king.” Polyperchon glared at the two men. Normally the guards would be handling this, but he had a hunch as to their actual naughtiness, its cause and reasons. “If you two have been prospecting gold on the border, I don’t care. But this was particularly suspicious.”

“How?” Perdiccas spat. “We were leaving, taking two horses towards the mountains.”

“Two horses and three donkeys.” Harpalus disagreed. “I told you we should have left when Philip opens the town, but he hasn’t, and we didn’t leave first.”

“We didn’t find out about that damn plague until the morning.” Polyperchon wished he was Antipater for a second, dealing with Attacles and that nasty case of snake in a baby’s crib, said baby being one of Philip’s heirs. It wasn’t that it couldn’t be or was not an accident or natural occurrence, it was the timing. And the snake, Olympias favored them, but she didn’t acknowledge Caranus as a threat to Alexander yet. His existence was troubling, but the babe still nursed on a breast. Eurydice and her uncle were the threat and Olympias didn’t bother killing the symbol of danger. If Olympias had made a move towards them that snake would have been curled in Eurydice’s bed.

“A plague?” He’d heard vague rumblings about a pox taking the sheep, but he was not a man to make his money in the sale of animals.

“You said ‘Harpulus, sheep are easy. Hire shepherds to take care of the damn things, sell their mutton or wool low, make enough to fund the project, and then some year the pox will kill the majority of the market and we’ll have the only sheep in the country.’ And then the pox took them!” Of course. It wasn’t that hard of a monopoly to manage, there was always a sheep shortage somewhere. The downside, Polyperchon realized, was that some days it was going to be you who lost the flock to the pox. “Gods damn you, Perdiccas, you do realize that I have a daughter to marry off this year?”

“Of course I do, you idiot!” Perdiccas’ voice was loud enough to make the chair that his friend was sitting in shake with the vibrations of his irritation. “I am the husband to be, Harnais is your only daughter.” Polyperchon couldn’t help but think that there were worse things to happen, but knew his friends. This sheep scheme tied up most of Harpalus’ spare funds at the moment, and he had intended for his daughter’s dower to be magnificent, or at the least enough for her to survive on gracefully should his friend and daughter’s husband fall in battle.

“So you were sneaking out of Aigai to do what, exactly?” Polyperchon wanted his assumptions to be verbally confirmed, even if he had inferred them to be wholly accurate.

“Liquidate our assets.” Harpulus stated. “I want what sheep we have left in another town to be kept safe from harm, and I want the sick sheep dead if possible.”

“No pox needs infect any healthy sheep.” Perdiccas seconded.

“Sheep?”

“Sheep.”

Gauze filled the air, spinning round and round until it formed balls, white layers of translucent fabric oozing out of the corners and into the spaces in between rooms, allowing the building to be both a building and an idea. Not all of the rooms within this place always existed, some blinking away if not thought of, some only existing when forgotten, places for things lost and items between a home. Each person who viewed this place viewed a different place, and each god knew it as a singular place, their home and the seat of their power, but their singularity was not the singular description each of their brethren would give of it.

Olympus, as Alexander dreamed it, was marble floors with high arches leading up to a starry ceiling, the walls painted with scenes of stories told to him, the translations of Homer that Aristotle had gifted him with, the stories that his mother had told him of her gods and Dionysus in his madness. There were his father’s tales of Achilles and Neoptolemes, the base of their line. In the spaces between stories he could see the dye creeping across the plaster, new forms shaping as on the edges of the walls old forms melted away as the white of the plaster faded through and the paintings edged out to the sides.

Lightning crackled through the air, accompanying a voice, and Alexander realized that his feet pressed upon the marble floor, barely able to walk forward as keeping his balance proved its own menace. The difference between marble and waves were many, and clearly both visual and tactile. He felt as if he were trying to wade through the waves lapping on the beach, but his feet were in their leather sandals, the sandals that he remembered a kneeling figure at his feet, hands on his feet and ankles, the sandals removed and set beside the box of clothing. Sea foam eyes staring up at him, a smile inviting him to nip against lips, press Hephaistion backwards.

“You wish me to interfere in this?” Zeus, for Alexander could see hints of lightning at the finger tips, dancing just within reach to be called within a second for use against another. “He is your child, Aphrodite, not mine.”

If the woman he watched was Aphrodite, she looked both alike to the statue that Hephaistion had placed in a corner of Alexander’s rooms, leaving his offerings of scented water and honey cakes to. The cheekbones were high, the body voluptuous, reminding him of an a woman whose beauty lay in her sensual expression of what she felt in her life, in her enjoyment of the whole of life’s offering. The tumbling hair was left loose, unfettered by jewelry or ribbons in waves that echoed the sea, and for but a moment he wondered if her hair truly had tides like the sea, the waves changing on a moment’s notice and spun to a storm by an angry Poseidon.

“On the contrary.” This was a more controlled sensual voice than the voice that relied on it’s power to seduce, woman’s recognition of the need of manipulation replacing and trying to convince the belief that if one willed it, it would be as one willed it to be. “My son is my son, and as I am many faces in many places, he would survive in any place upon which I have smiled. I would that you interfered for your son’s sake, as you have already done.”

“Philip’s death would be problematic in my dispute with Marduk.”Aphrodite raised an eyebrow. “Besides, Athena has hungered for war.”

“Alexander would have brought you more worship than you had dreamt of,” Aphrodite reminded. “Apollo assured this to you when you asked of the future. Why interfere?”

“Impermanence of worship, we would bleed as another god rose among the Latins, and even the worship of the _Magna Mater_ fell to his worshippers, their hatred of multiplicity and binary realities murderous.” His eyes were dark with the visions he’d seen in his son’s head. “We would not continue on, and fall bickering among each other as to the truth of what we should comfort our beloveds with.”

“Egypt will love us,” Aphrodite reminded him. “Loves us, truly. Alexander and Ptolemy will gift us with that.”

“And my son would die having left an incomplete footstep.” Zeus was a person of his own power, essentially. He was a god with a understanding that without his worshippers, he would die “It will be a different reality without his creation of an empire, but that he did not create it will mean that he can truly rule it instead of wasting his life on the conquering, losing your child to the _fading_ that affects your children untouched by loving hands.”

“Will you aid my child, then?” Aphrodite asked. “Aid my child to aid in your uplifting of yourself?”

“I already have, Aphrodite.” Zeus was stepping forward, his hands to the face of Aphrodite, missing as her face changed, eyes darkening and her place moving.

Watching them, Alexander blinked, Athena of the pale arms suddenly holding his hand, a hand across her face, a finger over her lips as she breathed.

 _“Shh.”_ The gauze around the room moved through his mind, and Alexander blinked, another room appearing, Athena still holding his hand. _“Stop.”_

Aphrodite settled onto the shell, the pearl among a bed clothed in fabric that had a sheen in the moonlight, the lap of the waves against the cliffs ringing through the room and peeling with the laughter of bronze bells that rang through the room. The man sitting on the edge of the bed was large, muscles large with the hands scarred of metalsmithery. His legs were roped with scars as seamed as his hands, old scars, but the man moved with them, the legs clearly still working even as he was a dark man and hard.

“Wife.” Only two gods had that title in all of the lands that spoke Greek, Alexander knew, and only one god would use the title between them. Aphrodite had been Ares’ wife-prize to silence his anger with his father for the sanction of his daughters’ rape. It was silenced, not abated according to the lore that he had learned as a child.

“Husband-mine.” Hephaestus settled against the bed, pressing a kiss against a bare shoulder, broad body moving against hers. “What do you remember of a child we once crafted?”

“You moved atop my body as if I were a particularly wild horse and you a rider who wished to bring our stable to the top of the racing competition, the young horse buckaloose beneath you as you sought to use only thighs to tame him.” The kiss had turned into a nuzzle against a collarbone.

“Husband!” Her body turned into his, and the lips moved higher, to her neck and face. “I asked of your father for a favor for our child.”

“He has a son to worry about in Macedon.” Hephaestus was nuzzling against an ear now, and had eyes closing as grey over took them, the pupil blown in anticipation.

“He gave us a favor for our child.” Aphrodite was smiling, and moving down her husband’s body, hands on either side of his hips as she moved herself thus that she was poised over him. The words escaped her mouth before it engulfed him. “He will have you build his son a gift to protect what is most precious to him.”

Athena’s hand was hard around his, and she was there again, holding him in place as he felt Aphrodite around him, clenching his jaw… _”Stop and remember.”_

Clenching his jaw and thrusting forward, the light of the lamp lit on the bedside table showing the bedroom to be just before dawn. Aphrodite’s face bled into another pair of eyes as mutable as the sea and a mouth wrapped around himself instead of Hephaistus, his hands no longer held by the goddess even as her words echoed through his ears.

_Stop. Stop and remember._

This was indeed a thing to remember, a warm mouth wet with saliva wrapped around his cock just as he woke up, shoulders braced to display the bruises that he’d placed there with his mouth the night before as, no, after he had tied Hephaistion’s wrists to brace his shoulders for his own pleasure. Ties that he had neglected to untie before he had pulled his beloved to his chest to sleep.

As much as this was a brilliant was to wake up, that would need to be remedied. His hands went from being clenched around the remnants of last night’s clothing and moved to his beloved’s face, pressing against the cheeks hollowed around his cock to halt Hephaistion.

Pulling his cock out of one of it’s homes was hard and seemed counter to what he needed at this moment, but there were other things to worry of. “Why did you not wake me? Remind me of this?” He asked Hephaistion, whose eyes stared up at his with a smile and a shrug halted by the leather thongs around his wrists.

Alexander moved down the bed, flipping them around and pulling the dagger out from underneath the pillow. Leather that was wet, even with the sweat that they generated, shrank, and it meant that the thongs that had been tight last night would be uncomfortable, possibly holding the blood in his beloved’s hands and keeping new blood above his beloved’s wrists. “I am going to have to cut the thongs loose,” he already had the knife between the wrist and the leather, pulling the knife through the leather and cutting a wrist free before moving to the other and repeating the measures. “beloved, next time wake me if I am this careless!” The order was issued as his hands engulfed the finer bones of his beloved, rubbing vigorously as he had once asked their wrestling teacher at a similar mistake many years before. His fingers massaged at the smaller joints, then at the larger joints, brushing in and up towards the wrists before gripping down and pulling out to the fingers again.

His teacher had taught him that such forgetfulness could result in the loss of digits or fingers if left to long.

“I will.” The familiar voice reassured. “I tried, but you weren’t _there_ , and then when you were, I thought that you would be well pleased to wake pleasured.”

“I was well pleasured.” The smile that answered him was a cat given praise for a mouse well caught or a snake enjoying the caress of the sun from a rock. “Could you clench your hands for me?” The hands fisted within his hands, and opened immediately after to him, the skin no longer distended and the color returning. “I wish you to move them above your head, hold them there for me.” The arms moved up the body under their own power, wrists nearly touching the plaster of the wall around them and knocking against the rings that had been set into the wall, the reason he had chosen this room of all others. The rings had once held up a shelf of some sort, but that had not sat upon them when he’d seen the room, instead he had realized another use for them and the matching set at the foot of the bed. Perhaps a past resident of these rooms had similar tastes, but he doubted it. Shelves within the bed were not unusual, that there were a set on both bottom and top was. Or perhaps the bed had not always been sunk in this form, instead raised on woven netting from those loops, a more likely scenario.

Alexander moved, arms going to either side of Hephaistion’s torso and bracing himself, pushing up so that his arms were bent and he had the space between his torso and his beloved’s to press his lips to the bruises that he had mottled the night before, moving to a spot slightly lower skin barely marked and setting his teeth to the flesh. Just enough pressure that he could feel the heat rising under the skin, then a tongue to sooth it before he brought the pull of his mouth to the skin to pull the blood up, flooding it under Hephaistion’s skin and marking his beloved with his care.

His mouth moved again, down the chest that was straining against him as it was heated by his lips and teeth towards the nipple tantalizing his eye. A stiffened tongue sweeping a broad arch against the rose peak brought the peak nearly into his mouth, and Alexander could see the hands moving, then pulled back into where he’d ordered them with force of will. Good. He did not want to punish Hephaistion today, and Hephaistion was not needy of the reassurance that his punishment often gave him. Amyntor’s constant disregard of his beloved annoyed Alexander, and he knew that his attention salved that injury, as long as he remembered that sex was not necessarily attention.

The cock that he loved lay inert upon Hephaistion’s thigh, and his preference for his beloved’s navel was indulged for a moment as he foreshadowed later actions with his tongue. First he chased the edges of the rim, playing with entering before stabbing harshly and then pulling away for a second, feeling his Hephaistion straining up, hips spread so that his thighs lay wide, and Alexander gladly moved them further apart to resettle his body between his beloved’s thighs, moving his fingers to the lamp at the side of the bed. The olive oil inside was warmed, and if he took from the edges of the pot it would not be too warm for what it was needed for. The burning oil would not be acceptable.

His fingers and tongue moved now in rhythm, and he heard Hephaistion murmuring into the air, and he remembered to take the time to change that. A quirk of his tongue changed the moaning into a shout, as Hephaistion lifted off the bed, and Alexander realized that his cock needed release soon and he move up, wiping the last of the oil onto himself and his hands going to his beloved’s thighs, moving them to his own hips before easing his way into the entryway he had prepared, his fingers near the entrance, a forefinger hooked into an indent that he’d felt there since he could remember this act with Hephaistion, fingers ready to ease the way if needed.

Warm, familiar heat now hugged his cock, holding tightly onto and around him as he thrust forward, nudging against the spot that he had pulled a shout out of earlier when his tongue had twisted and his fingers pulsed. This time he lunged forward, catching Hephaistion’s lips in his rather than leave them open, heaving with breath as his body shook around Alexander’s.

They parted around him as he nibbled, warmth echoing and embracing him, welcoming him home and letting him play. His tongue stuttering in and out as he sought the shout of earlier, swallowing it when Hephaistion surrendered it to Alexander’s body, his body shuddering through the last peak of pleasure. Alexander then lost it there as shudder turned into vibration and constriction around his cock, and Alexander let his arms pull Hephaistion up and into him as the last of his orgasm pulled out. Rolling to the bed, he could feel the last of his hips canting forward, pulling his beloved into his arms.

_Stop and remember._

Athena’s words echoed through his ears for a second, and he looked at the eyes as grey as the sea in a storm, peering up at him from his chest, a sated smile on Hephaistion’s lips.

 _Stop_. Aphrodite had looked upon her husband with that same smile, the same smile that he had slept with the night before. “You are as beautiful as the sea beneath the cliffs of your mother’s temple.” He couldn’t say the exact words that he meant, but he hoped that the meaning was evident.


	5. Part 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once is regicide, twice is conspiracy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is not permitted to be posted outside of An Archive of Our Own.
> 
> It is recently back on my list of works being reworked, feedback is appreciated, not negativity.

The red cloak was noticeable in the dark of the early morning, the sun rising over the mountains. It was for that reason that Arrhidaeus had borrowed one of his brother’s cloaks to make the journey from his rooms to the apartment that his father inhabited. The summons had come to him barely an hour before, and even as dawn peaked over the mountains, rosy tongues of solar rays peered over the tops of the mountains looking for a welcome on the other side, they had yet to rise out of bed when he’d risen from his to attend his father. Apparently, Philip was bored without distractions, and the messenger had been sent ot him at the discretion of Meda, avoiding Eurydice’s words on Alexander.

Philip’s blankets were piled in his lap, his chest bared to the air as he sat up in bed, eyes on patient Meda, pointedly ignoring him until he answered the question put ot him. It was not that they did not get along in a friendly fashion, but rather that Philip withheld affection or attention if his children did not follow his leadership in all things. Arrhidaeus had learned this of Philip’s behavior towards Alexander, and was quite happy with Philip’s usual benign affection and distracted amusement. This fit of temper was protection of a friend and not anything more notable.

“How is my other son?” There were two other acknowledged sons, Alexander and Caranus, but ‘other son’ was his brother and not Eurydice’s babe in arms, or rather the babe her arms did not hold, sprawled on the couch adjacent to the bed, eyes lidded in sleep he knew to be feigned.

“I have yet to see him of this morning, but when I left his apartment last night, he was well. Joined by Leonnatus, Cassander, Hephaistion, they were arguing on politics and Athenian trouble. Something about Demosthenes’ latest political speech, fairly polemical.” Arrhidaeus related. “They were in fine fettle, Alexander and Leonnatus were arguing over the reality of Athenian politics and the relevance of the Spartan government. I think.”

“You think.” Philip’s smiles scared his acknowledged son at time, disliking the threat of violence as well as its reality, and that smile was worn when Philip planned actions that razed villages. “What else did they speak of?”

“Cassander thought they should have more focus on Persia and the campaign there, Alexander disagreed.”

“Why?” Philip’s respect for his son’s recall of this, if not his lack of understanding was why he had called Arrhidaeus to him. Bucephalus had benefitted from his budding skill with animals, something that the soldiers had whispered of, that he whispered magical words and the horses fell in love, but that Philip had yet to see.

“Alexander’s spies have heard whispers of wars between giants in Persia, that Artemis’ hunt has run through the streets of Babylon in pursuit of a man running with shadows.” That was unpleasant news, Artemis’ hunt was not a thing of the _polis_ , this he knew. Philip had seen her hunting a man, years before. He had been a soldier whose interests in rape had been the cause of a theft of a girl from her dedication to Artemis, her blood yet to flow and blood spilt on the paving stones leading into to the temple. The dogs had torn him apart, and his body had been left there, his curse to ever wander the earth until one who did not fear the wrath of the gods would give him proper burial. “There are rumors of rioting in some of the village towns as this year’s ewes have neglected to bear live young and their dinners for the upcoming winter has grown increasingly less likely with news of sheep taken by the pox in the mountains.”

“How bad?” Philip had known that the pox had taken sheep this year, it always did, but if it was bad enough that another disaster lead to rioting, it was indicative of potentially worse options brewing. “How many sheep?”

“Forty of every hundred sheep in the kingdom of the expected number of sheep to be counted for slaughter are dead.” Arrhidaeus wished he knew more of sheep to tell of what could be causing this. Food would be tight at the end of the year, even at the king’s table. The army would be dealing with rebellion and starvation within it’s own ranks and where it was garrisoned along the rebellious borders. “That number goes up to 70 percent in the mountains where the pox is, and where there have been no lambs born, the shepherds are worried as to the number that they can safely slaughter. The problem is they are unsure if it is illness or gods causing the lack of fertility, and they are more worried that they know not if it was the rams that covered the ewes who lack fertility or the reverse, as if the issue is permanent, they will need to replace them.”

“My family in Thrace,” Meda’s voice spoke, her hands clicking with the spindle that danced through the thread she spun, thread that would be dyed a deep color and used. “say that they have similar issues with their sheep at the moment.” Her family was aristocratic but of an agrarian family, not city born or expecting city things.

They looked to the door as a clatter was heard outside the bedroom, in the central room, and one of the guards stuck his head in.

“Sorry, Dactyion tripped.” The man looked off, and as more of his face was revealed, Arrhidaeus went to the dagger sheathed on his hip.

His shoulders were wide and he remembered seeing them last night quivering to project the voice he was using in his shouting match with Alexander about the Persian border, his worry that the stories of the gods warring there was a distraction from the reality there, that the border was less safe than it sounded. Alexander’s answering tight voice and gesturing hands had been enunciating his issues, his thought that Demosthenes might finally have generated enough support in Athens to support movement along the border and against Philip. That tapered waist preferred the tunic of the aristocrat to the soldier’s garb that he was now using, and the sword that he was drawing stealthily, he knew how to use.

Arrhidaeus was thankful that his seat next to Meda was obscured from the door by shadows thrown by the disparity of the light of the lamps and the light barely warming the air from the windows, and he watched the familiar slide into the room.

Swords practice had meant that he’d seen that slide before. It was not a usual thing, but he had seen it practiced, and while it was against polite sword practice it was still effective. The short sword that he’d seen used and practiced with was most effective in close combat, and by no means was close combat what was to be attempted.

In the hallway outside the apartment shouting rose, and Arrhidaues noted the tiny drops of blood on the hands and wrists. The grip on the sword was slippery between the hand and pommel, and the pommel of the dagger sheathed in the belt was also wet. “Mnesion’s dead!” The shout made it through clearly, and the feet outside pounded. Philip’s reach suddenly ectended as his hands on the bed moved from nestled in the blankets at his groin toward the dagger that he had on the table on the bed.

The man masked as a soldier lunged, the sword pushing forward as soldiers came into the room, Arrhidaeus noted as he pushed Meda to safety, and she pulled Eurydice down with her, jostling the girl awake. Eyes wide, she was observing the room, stunned by the scene, already squealing in terror as Meda clapped a hand over the girl’s mouth.

Even as Arrhidaeus moved to take the sword, halt the attack, the sword-throw was aborted, and pulled up, in. Falling down as the sword pushed through his back, the blood started pooling. Arrhidaeus moved forward, kneeling at the side to push the body over as the soldiers finished rushing into the room, Polyperchon moving behind him.

“Names.” Polyperchon was demanding names, but the attacker’s mouth was frothing, blood staining the white bubbles as lungs and heart mingled. “Names, gods damn you, Leonnatus!”

Philip could see his son shaking his head in negation.

“There will be no names.” He was saying. The man was gasping, blood gurgling and no words could be heard coherently. “He’s as good as dead.” A grim smile was spreading across the man’s face even as his body spread across the floor, his bodily functions releasing and staining the smell of the air with the smell of rot and liquids soured by the body. “That’s why he fell upon his sword, so you could ask him no names if he failed.”

“His name is enough of a name, now that he’s failed.” Polyperchon knelt, watching the man die. “And it confirms other things.” The blood was ceasing to pool, the top of the pool edging together, solidifying into a mass that floated on the top as fat would sit on the milk of goats and sheep before it was taken to be made into dinner, made into cheese. Congealing and loosing liquid form, the edge of the pool tacky and beginning to be tacking to the touch as the gasping for breath grew more strained and rattled as the blood filled the lungs. Each breath rattled and gurgled its way through an intact throat but a disrupted heart and lungs. The damage done was pooling inside the body, blood that once flowed through channels now inhabited the cave inside the body, and the foam itself dried upon the lips as the area that once would have held it lost the space to place it, use it in a body that no longer needed it as functions finished. “Once is regicide. Twice is conspiracy.”

“If you think that it’s a conspiracy,” Philip’s voice was weakened by the wound in his side, but not as it would be in an ordinary man, a man whose shout was a normal tone of voice when speaking to his companions. Instead of the agora filling bellow that he had argued using during the debates as to the form of the invasion of Persia, he used an equally forceful tone that would not carry down the hallway and out to the soldiers carrying the corpse of Leonnatus to the same room containing Pausanias’ body. Wishing for a moment to be accompanying those soldiers, Polyperchon remembered the scent of the room the last time he had walked past its closed doors. The preservatives that they were using had a distinctive smell, one that his nose expelled mucus at. “then what else do you think?”

Philip had shifted his body, sitting fully erect in bed. The strain that it must be putting on the healing wound was not allowed to pass onto his face, but his words were tight and his eyes squeezed as he avoided and reflected allowing it on his face to display to the whole of the world. Wincing, Polyperchon crossed the room to the couches emptied of Eurydice and Meda, their handmaidens no longer a silent presence at the edges of the room. This was a room of men now, Philip and Polyperchon, Eumenes attending, Antipater conspicuously absent.

“I think that there is rioting in Pella.” Knowing this was different than stating this, however. “The rumors of a coming winter shortage of food, the pressure of a king stabbed in the chest at his daughter’s wedding to an ally. That the people of Macedon have not seen their king since one of his body guards stabbed him, all of this worries them.” An accented Greek, to Philip’s ear who had first spoken Macedonian, then Greek, Polyperchon used, not unusual in the Macedonian court. Half of which had ties to the many _polis_ in Greece through marriage, blood, or trade, the court was still infected with the practicality of it’s Macedonian king and the military presence through out the court. This was not Athens where rioting would take and destroy a city if they were not careful, in Macedon they would let the rioting end itself and watch the riots for its causes. “I am not as worried of this as I am of the rioting in the mountain villages. The court will return to Pella, and Pella can last the winter on things stored away for safekeeping. The villages in the mountains depend on their sheep for sustenance and heat, and without the first the amount of the second will not matter. They cannot trade wool or mutton that they don’t have for food that they cannot grow.”

“Arrhidaeus said something of this to me.” Philip had heard that conversation and this one had something else to it.

“He did not know that Perdiccas and Harpaulus had a large mutual investment in sheep in the mountains. An investment that has not ruined their options for the winter but was bad enough for them to try and break the,” it wasn’t a quarantine, but “enclosement around Aigai. No travel in or out, and that excluded the messengers, but they were trying to get out. Tried to go out a goat trail, and that ended badly.”

“Badly, how?” Gesturing to Polyperchon to sit rather than lean on the couch, Philip was leaning forward, mouth slightly open as he listened and paid attention. “Why a goat trail?”

“They thought it wouldn’t be watched, and it wasn’t. it was patrolled instead, and we had set a trap to disencourage travelers.” Widened eyes and a nod of understanding from the king, Polyperchon sat in the couch, sinking into the studding and enjoying the seat. “They were bringing along a goat for some reason they’ve neglected to explain to me, and it tripped over the trap. Their horses were startled and threw them, running back to Aigai past the guards on their patrols. Two badly bruised men were toted back to me, and I asked them about it. They were not malicious.”

“Malicious or not, they were stupid. What else?” The sheep situation wasn’t everything. Politics had filled Philip’s life for the past twenty years, and his kingdom was hard won with his control carefully tended.

“Pausanias was killed before I could question him, as you remember. He had a series of letters in his belongings that were not signed, and at first I thought them interesting but not condemning. They were not signed, but the handwriting was not his, nor the phrasing. It was a Macedonian turn of phrase from our generation that tipped me off. He was being courted and manipulated, reminded of the place of his family in Macedon and the _injustice_ done him when you would not allow Attalus’ punishment in that incident a year back.” Polyperchon had thought how that was written was wrong, or how he read it was wrong, as it did not completely make sense, but he could not make everything understandable to the other man what he did not understand himself. “The writings worry me.”

“You think another person was involved.” Surprise was not evident on Philip’s face. “What of the young man’s attack, Leonnatus was what Arrhidaeus called him?”

“Also not acting alone. Or if he was acting alone, he was involved with the first attempt. If Pausanias succeeded, it would have mattered much less who had been involved in your death as they most likely would be involved with the aftermath and head one of the factions attempting the kingship.” The couch allowed Polyperchon to lean into it, something that he had not indulged in since before this began. His sleep patterns were at the mercy of his need for answers and his demand of constant interrogations that he must oversee. There was no way of controlling things that he was not involved in, thus his bed was abandoned more than it was embraced in the last few days. “The second attempt was sloppy. The first, Pausanias would have lived, and if he had died some groups may have poured libations. Leonnatus was probably involved in the planning and when Pausanias failed after Athena’s intervention, he was killed.”

“You think he was killed to keep him from indicating conspirators.” Reiteration or not, Philip would go over the new information in the light of the old information. It let him compare the differences and catalogue their implications, something that Polyperchon did as well, but was more intimately familiar with the material involved than Philip was, even if the sword was through his side. “And Leonnatus was one of those conspirators and decided to finish the jobs.”

“He was not one of the masterminds of it, though.” Early morning was good for a sneak attack, as was garbing oneself as a person trusted by the target, but the lack of reconnaissance within the room and an awake target with accompaniment was shoddy and well thought through. “He had no personal grudge against you, unlike the one that Pausanias harbored.”

“His allegiance is with Alexander.” Polyperchon disagreed on this. “But I agree, the style of attack is different.”

“Alexander had nothing to do with Pausanias, though.” He’d checked samples of Alexander’s handwriting and the handwriting of Hephaistion against those letters on a hunch, found them disparate in style. “I think that we’re missing another faction in this, and Leonnatus fell upon his sword to keep the silence of his conspiracy.”

“Speaking of conspiracy, one of the guards who killed Pausanias?” The question was pointed and hard to answer.

“It could go either way. By Macedonian custom and law, the man who attempts regicide or succeeds is a traitor, even if they commit regicide and not assassination of a king, and a traitor’s death is right by law.” Polyperchon had spent time on this. “Antipater’s orders that Pausanias be taken alive for questioning were legal, but subject to the law of the land as well.” The two guards had spent several sessions of time under his questioning, and he had probably lost the ability to ever command them into battle again in his search for answers not yet given or even alluded to. “Either way, it was done. If one of them thought to silence Pausanias permanently, I cannot get them to say.”

“Are you having them watched?” Reasonable question, if foolish to Polyperchon, who had vehement reassurances hidden on his tongue before Philip redacted it. “Yes, of course you are. Both are probably being watched by some of your spies.”

“Yes.” Polyperchon wasn’t the only man who had those who watched for him and men who spoke of things to him, but he was a man skilled in such things in Macedon and in Epirus. “My spies also report other things abroad. Athens is speaking of raising a force against Macedon again, and this time Demosthenes is raising support for it as you have not been seen in public since the attack. One of my men in Epirus was approached by a man offering to buy his service away from me, not just in addition to my service. The borders are rumbling against you and our people are worried you are dead.”

“I am not, but I see the issue. I should address them shortly.” A litter would be a sign of weakness. Polyperchon was twitching, Philip noticed. “What else?”

“Leonnatus is one of Alexander’s companions.” It was true and a harsh truth. “You had banished several of his friends for their actions involving the Carian Prince, and kept another here forcefully when Alexander and his mother fled Macedon in your instability towards them at the time. While it is fairly simple to keep an eye on them, and I do have eyes on Ptolemy and CLeitus, they are not as closely watched as they could be here.”

“What exactly are you saying?”

“If I were to plot an action against you,” he had done that several times as a mental exercise in this search for conspirators. “I would scout every possible ally in killing you, and approach those I deemed appropriate.”

“You think that those banished may be involved.” Philip could see it.

“I want their banishment rescinded and them ordered to Aigai so I can question them.” The next part was worse to try and get past Philip. “I also want Alexander placed under house arrest.”

“Why?” He wasn’t the best reader of men, but the ruddy face that his king was displaying usually faced dissembling soldiers about to confess to some naughtiness or another. “What else are you worried of?”

“Leonnatus was Alexander’s man, and that will throw the implication that he was involved upon him. He could be targeted by another as punishment for the attempt, or I could use this to prove that he isn’t involved.”

“How many of his people do you want under house arrest?”

“Everyone.”

“Done.”

The usual rustle of Europa as she arose in the nursery did not wake Attacles this morning, instead it was the coo that he had heard little Caranus use many times as he reintroduced his mouth to an appropriate teat. The young prince loved his dinner, and would continue that cooing until other appropriate actions were committed.

That meant that gaseous noise that his nurse and his mother, at her former nurse’s direction, encouraged him to make, some of the time followed by a emission from his mouth of what had been until seconds before his dinner, else of his time emission from his other side, not this dinner but another dinner. Either were less preferable to Attacles’ dodging the third form of emission that he had encountered of Caranus’ physically while changing the baby’s nappy: the fourth form was vocal, and Attacles believed that it had scarred his ears, certainly his mind. Thankfully the little one was not one much for waking up those living with him with wailing, preferring to wail with displeasure when in the company of others and still being ignored. Attacles’ fondness of his cousin’s son and daughter was combating any desire for a wife of his own, and then the obligatory children.

Dymenes somehow seemed oblivious to the issues coming from the possession of children, and was imperfectly enamored of Dymenecles, Dikenais’ son most likely shared with Dymenes. They had both retired to their own places for the night, for while Dymenes’ loyalty was at the hand of Attacles, Attacles’ realized, his libido was in the hands of Dikenais. It made for a quiet suite until now, and as Attacles rose out of his bed and wrapped his chiton around him, he realized what had changed.

In the night his cousin must have returned from her husband’s bed side and was now also occupying the women’s quarters. The rustling and twisting and turning that he’d heard in the night and disregarded as the children settling into their places for the night was actually Eurydice returning, her nurse checking on the baby with her accompaniment. The two women retiring to Eurydice’s bedroom, the nurse taking the daybed that was her usual place within the quarters as _duenna_ , and the women undressing for bed, having some of the fruits left out in the central room for a slight meal before bed. It was not an unconscionable thing, but Eurydice had not been with Europa, the girl child woke when her mother sat on her bed or bent to press a kiss to the child’s forehead. Europa’s greeting of her mother could have woken the whole apartment and certainly would have woken Attacles.

Attacles kept an ear focused on the nursery at all times that he was within the apartments for any untoward noises in the room that the children inhabited. He thought it more appropriate to have that knowledge, though he thought that Attalus’ lusts would perhaps slake noticeably if such noises were made, and even without the man’s presence, Attacles’ could not silence his worries.

The cooing muted from the adjoining nursery as Eurydice presumably moved to the main room of the womens’ quarters and the more comfortable seating arrangement there for her whilst nursing. From where Attacles stood with comb in hand as he attempted to rectify the misdeed sleep did to his hair, he could hear a new sound in the nursery.

Whuffle, whuffles, muffled wa-a-a-h, whuffle, snuffle, wa-a-ah!

Unhappy child, Europa most likely, having woken at her mother’s entrance to the nursery but pointedly ignored when she had pulled on her mother’s chiton. He had witnessed it before in the presence of his father and had been oblidged to ignore it: sons were more valued than daughters, and Eurydice’s value to his father and to her husband was in her ability to successfully conceive. The culmination of that was in Caranus upon whom she lavished adoration and appreciation, and the by blow of that was in Europa, ignored and pacified by her mother and her nurse, her mother’s hand maiden and former nurse herself.

The hair was done enough, and he looked clean, Attacles realized with a sweep of hands down his body. Holding the comb, he stepped through the door and into the nursery, stepping to the bed that held the shaking ball of child.

“Europa?” There was a little tuft of hair sticking out of the blankets, and that would be his first target. Sitting down on the bed, he held the comb on the flat of his hand. “Eurrie, I can’t comb your hair out unless you sit up and pull yourself out of the covers.” His eyes were on the window into the outside, and while he could see the fingers of dawn crawling over the side of the mountain, the basket of Helios’ chariot was not fully visible. Whilst they were usually up at dawn to avoid the full heat of the day, the move to Aigai over a month before had exhausted the girl child, her excitement at the movement of an entire court having made her vibrate for days on end. That exhaustion had barely abated and then the wedding of her half sister had made the girl so curious, and he’d had to ask Meda to accompany the girl so she could see what the preparations were for such a wedding.

The girl had sat up, and the tunic she had worn to bed folded downwards from its place around her chest. Europa must move, Attacles had echoed such movements as a youth and even now, enough in her sleep to make sleeping with her uncomfortable. If he should see the bruises upon her that he had gained in punishment, but he would not. Could not. Her hair was braided back, not a mess of tangles but a fuzz of hair surrounded her face and shoulders escaping from the braid, and he released the thong.

Untangling the braid, he placed the thong on a nearby table, and began to work on the braid from the bottom. “You do realize that your mother does not mean to hurt you?” The shoulders started shaking again, and he placed a heavy hand there, warming her skin and in hope to warm her heart and dry her tears. If he were a man much effected by crying women he might have been, but in this he affected a heavy heart. His disdain for Europa’s mother was not something that she needed to comprehend while still this young. “Caranus is her only purpose, and she does not realize that you also embellish her status as a mother of an heir of Macedon.”

“What do you mean?” She wasn’t old enough to comprehend this, but Attacles’ had realized this some time back.

“You are proof that she could carry a healthy child to term.” Unlike Meda, his favorite of all of Philip the King’s wives, who had yet to carry a child half to term, but had neither lost nor gained the King’s favor overmuch. “You are also easily marriageable, daughter of two Macedonian bloodlines. Until I have a child, your first son would be my heir.” He named the reasons. “Caranus is not applicable as the King has named him as his legitimate son and a potential heir, and our nobility cannot coincide as such unless it was joining the kingship forever.” The comb hit a snagged knot and he pulled it out to work through the not. He had learned this from his nurse, who had thought that teaching him to brush his own hair fist was acceptable, but someone else’s would allow him the skill to calm another person close to him down, and the sobs had subsided in proof. “You could also have a child in the line of succession to the King, your father’s throne, or even be Queen in your own right provided that all others in the line of succession die suddenly and without issue.” He might have thought a little too hard on the specifics of that, as it had occurred to him that a Queen such as the woman who was said to have ruled Carthage, and created it, and the women who had held such positions of power and of whom Odysseus had visited were far more stable rulers. The war with Persia threatened trading with Persia, which would cut down on his own profits.

“Tell me more?” Eurydice’s daughter was leaning into him and her voice was already silencing as she drifted back into sleep. The exhaustion of the last night had finally finished with Europa, and Attacles continued to speak of her worth as he tucked her back under the covers and went to close the linens that could and did cover the windows into the palace. The thong he took to the box which held such things, and he opened it.

The base of the box, the bottom was moved from how it lay normally, and the grain of the wood was reversed, a corner poking into where Attacles meant to place the thong. An experimental prod with the tip of his finger caused the edge of the box to move. Parchment beneath was exposed, and Attacles removed the bottom with questing fingers and placed it aside.

The parchment was lifted out, and he opened the first piece of parchement, recognizing familiar handwriting. His eyes caught on the signature at the bottom of the page, Attacles began to read.

_Eurydice,_

_I would like to inquire as to the health of your husband. While Persia is certainly different to Pella, I am gladly anticipating my homecoming. All of my household turned out to greet me as a happy homecoming hero._

_I am proud of your news of Caranus’ birth, it certainly allows my plans for my homecoming to be accelerated. We are not men of the epiklarate’s loins, here in Macedon, to my disturbance from my time in Athens. Europa’s worth is less here than it is in Athens. I hope that you have not touched upon the ire of your husband’s orgiastic whore or her son’s catamite? Should either of them be overly disturbed by you, my plans will be disturbed, so be cautious! Dispose of this letter judiciously._

Judiciously was not hiding it in Europa’s room, judiciously was, Attacles’ thought, disposing of it in the fireplace. The fire would mean that only gods and oracles could read it, not mere man.

_I anticipate the successful culmination of my preparation of Pausanias, and anticipate seeing you and our little King Caranus at your husband’s funeral. If only my preparation of Attacles had more fully made a mind alike to ours, but as death will solve Pausanias’ ill deeds so will it be successful against your cousin._

_With Pride,_

_Attalus._

_Oh! Also, have my son buy you the fabric and dye that you’d wished for? You deserve it for the birth of a son._

It wasn’t the derogative words that made Attacles breath in, he swore, or the admission of involvement and death-wishing of the king. The reality of his place in his father’s affections was the cause, but he knew that an appropriately placed knife would remedy this issue.

_Leonnatus,_

_I know that you do not like the woman who apes our ways, and I would counsel you to patience regarding her. Trust her as you would me._

There was more of the letter, signed with the damning signature, and Attacles’ finished the letters before replacing them all appropriately as to how they had been found, only making sure that they were appropriately hidden as his cousin was not inclined to do.

If Philip died, his life was in flux, the likely end result being his disinheritance in the least, his burial mound holding him in the most likely reality. However, his life would change regardless, as his cousin was not the most likely to keep silent on things needing silence, and her survival was questionable if she acted unwisely. That snake though, was a surprise. Too obvious for Olympias against anyone, but perhaps someone else wished Eurydice dead? He could wait to see, Leonnatus might not attempt on the king.

“He tried to kill my husband in front of my very eyes!” There was the sound of his cousin’s nurse shushing her and making an attempt to comfort the girl. “He was supposed to be subtle, get the job done.”

Damning words. He was involved by not saying anything now, and should they be found out and it be known that he knew and said nothing, his head would be with his families’ as traitors to King Philip.


	6. Part 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Into temporary new quarters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This piece of work is not authorized to be posted anywhere save An Archive of Our Own.

The way was not difficult, and this was a nice enough day that Arrhidaeus had abandoned his cloak at the end of the move into the villa that was a more effective environment to enforce a house arrest upon. Unlike the apartments within the palace here in Aigai, the villa had not the same multiple entrances and exits. At one time the home of a royal family not the most close to the throne, it was well appointed with an eye to both defense and the enforced occupation of naughty royals. Arrhidaeus was fully aware that the ease of imprisonment within it was why Antipater had come to Alexander with the orders from their father of the upcoming imprisonment.

Moving was guaranteed to preoccupy his brother and his brother’s fledgling household. All of the companions in the Palace had thought to show their loyalty to Alexander with their lifestyles, and it promised to be a house of tight quarters. The trunk in his hands was just the first of the things that needed to move to the new quarters. Curious of his brother’s priorities, Arrhidaeus had lifted a corner of the trunk, and could not help but wonder what his brother was doing with his two bed mates that he was bored enough to work on making bridles in his spare time. That and other lengths of leather were nestled into the trunk with what was most likely olive oil, to keep the leather supple.

The sun was beating against the sand of the road, and it had thankfully packed down under numerous feet of both equine and human form, rolling carts and chariots. If it were blowing, he would spend the evening wasting water in an attempt to remove it from its place irritating his eyes, something that he would avoid.

Foot in front of foot, Alexander and the others were still in the apartment. Alexander was sending them out to move the individual boxes, and it was only his status as his father’s son that Arrhidaeus was avoiding the oversight of a well ordered soldier as guard while moving these boxes. Next to him, Nikenais was a quiet horse without much anger at the multiple bags strapped to her body as Arrhidaeus embraced a short cut to speed the moving process. Nikenais was supposed to be in training to bear one of Alexander’s companions into battle, and the mare was only taking a lesson in carrying dead weight calmly from him and this mission. She seemed more placid than her youth spoke of her, and Arrhidaeus had chosen to cull her from the herd that was to be a wedding gift to Cleopatra and Alexander of Epirus based on her insuitability to a show. Nikenais was spotted grey, mottled and somewhat ugly, not a horse to bear the reins of a chariot.

They came from the edge of the road, a thicket, and the first thing that he felt was the rasp of wood scraping above the wood as it came crashing down and against him. The second thing was the feel of the reins of Nikenais as she startled from the man heading towards them with a knife, his compatriot with the bat moving in against Arrhidaeus as Nikenais rolled back on her haunches and tried to launch herself forward. She failed at that, but recovered enough to, as Arrhidaeus felt the impact and implicit crunch of the bat and his vision began to waver as black clouds seemed to momentarily obscure the sky and sand and the men around him, push her haunches forward. If the crack that Arrhidaeus both heard and felt was the bat against him or Nikenais’ hooves as she kicked the swarthy man with the knife in the chest, it faded into the sudden vacuum of sound as the clouds rushed forward and into his mind, removing his senses and consciousness.

“So are the clothes ready to be unpacked?” Alexander was turning in his new rooms, his eyes on the trunks overflowing with cloth stacked near the door into the bed chamber. “Barsine?”

“Yes!” It was an annoyed shout that echoed out of the bed chamber, and Alexander wondered for a moment if it was the pressure of working with Hephaistion in this that brought her voice to loudness and her tone to irritation. The woman had neglected to disguise her disapproval of the situation, which he had dealt with in the manner that his father had once used successfully on his mother. The promise of especial treatment should she toe the line was not above the need for a peaceful home. Even with his companions and a singular concubine, this difference of egos made him believe that a multiplicity of wives might make the likelyhood of heirs grow, but removed the likelyhood of his survival to his second decade as an adult. In this he would endeavor only to marry those who had proven fertility, and thought that his uncle was silly for wedding Cleopatra for her virginity and bloodlines. Was he the only member of the family who had realized that the heirs born of the women of the _epiklerote_ used habitually within a family line were often without the mental abilities needed to comprehend their status as heir? Perhaps it was also fear that they might be the receptacle of their father’s attentions. The end results of rape had recently involved an attempt at murder. “Could you keep your _eromenos_ away from me?”

“Hephaistion?”

“I was folding the bed’s clothes into the trunk for it, and went to add the shrine to Aphrodite as your Lady went for the shrine as well. We bumped into each other, not a surprise in such a small place, my Prince.” Barsine must also irritate Hephaistion, he had long before ceased the use of that title but for appropriate occasions, not in conversation across the room, and the tightness of voice reminded him of other things. “She now wishes to unpack the shrine as well

“Would that be the shrine of Aphrodite that you brought with you from your mother’s temple?” It was small, a gorgeous piece of statuary with an incense burner cradled in the Goddess’ lap and intricate painted detail work. He had only ever touched it after Hephaistion had introduced him to it, joining with him in prayer. It was not a wholly holy thing, but those who were uninitiated to it were often shocked, and the household staff had avoided the shrine after it had given one of the maids the feelings of overwhelming lust.

“Was there another shrine to my Lady in the apartment, my Prince?” That was spite, practically spitting across the room as Hephaistion joined Barsine in the main room. “The whole of the bed chamber was packed, and the food stuffs were sent ahead with the slaves from the kitchens and cleaning. The villa is fully furnished to the standards of the Palace, but the special furniture and the personal furniture were just brought in.”

“Special furniture?” There was a third masculine voice joining the conversation, and Alexander turned to the door behind him. “Hello, brother!” Ptolemy was striding across the room, and Thais smiled silently, nodding in greeting at Hephaistion as her master embraced Alexander. For the Persian woman, Alexander realized, Thais had only the echoes of a true smile, rather amusement occupied her eyes and a protective hand embraced her belly. As Ptolemy pulled back and Alexander’s eyes rolled the length of him he realized the deep tan involved and the smile creasing the edges of his cheeks and eyes. His hair was rolling around on his shoulders and the lax muscles said that whilst he had been practicing his swords’ play, he had more embraced the practice of bed play.

“You look well.”

“What, no hugs for me?” Cleitus was then there, crowding Alexander and being pulled close in an embrace. “How have you been?” Cleitus was the man that he remembered him to be, big and broad, of a build that wasn’t what his personality proposed that he be, instead of the giant that the first impression gave him in size. Abrasively happy, his first love was not the wine that his ruddy face spoke of but rather the people themselves. His life in court was in the services of those peoples, the villagers in the village attached to his family’s lands, the women who were alike to his sister in service and pleasures, the boys learning to be soldiers. His face, often of a less than happy visage allowed a smile through the crags at his liege’ appearance.

Being released by Cleitus, Alexander could feel his lips stretching and his cheeks twitching in bemusement. Being placed under house arrest was less of an issue when he had just received visitors, refugees from former exile, dear friends dearly tried by the last few months, couple years, and his own issues with the status quo. Or rather, his issues with both his father and his mother, their individual ambitions both for themselves and for him, and his own ambitions. They all oddly seemed to clash.

“I’ve been better.” Admission was no great difficulty. “You both look as though the break from court has served you well.”

“What is it that your father is getting at?” Ptolemy acknowledged only the man who raised him as his father, probably rightly. “One moment I have my lips moving up,” and Thais was blushing, his smirk reminding the room of his placement of lips as he converted his words. “and then there’s a knock on the door, my servant has braved the beast and the women’s quarters to tell me that a messenger has arrived. With him, official papers to recall me, us, back to the court.”

“My father,” it was the pain of watching it happen again. “my father, there was,” he could feel his chest tightening with emotions. It was as if the fear, the horror was back in his chest, hands clutching at his hand and raking against his lungs.

“The King,” a familiar and much relied upon voice saved him, ensuring accurate answers to the question that Ptolemy asked and Cleitus understood the need for an answer to. “was attacked at the wedding of Cleopatra to Alexander of Epirus. The attacker was Pausanias, a member of King Philip’s body guard, a former warmer of his bed, and died in the aftermath of the attack. We would not be as problematic to Polyperchon if Leonnatus had not made an attempt at the assassination of King Philip in the last few days.” Alexander watched grey eyes glisten green and a hand grip his shoulder to relay strength. “You were recalled to be questioned as to if you were involved, or even if you were approached by someone suspicious.”

“I find it suspicious that you wouldn’t know about something like this, Hephaistion.” Barsine’s voice had traces of maliciousness, and as they had finished the move to the new house, he found himself what else she and his beloved had clashed.

“The only way he wouldn’t have heard of this,” Thais was speaking, and she so rarely spoke in the company of others that the men surrounding her stopped to listen to her words. The voice was soft and melodious, familiar to Hephaistion who had entered the temples with her at Pella caught the attention of Alexander especially in this moment. Barsine’s mind could not forget that Thais held a similar position to her own, and that enforced her attention if not her comprehension of Thais’ understanding. “would be if one or more of those involved with the attempts knew of his position in your circle, my lord Prince Alexander.” The chiton she wore was black, setting off honeyed skin, dark eyes, and hair worn in a multitude of slender braids with obsidian beads that echoed echoed her eyes. The collarbone revealed under her chiton showed a reddened area, healing in the time that it had taken to get to Aigai from where they had been staying. “Leonnatus was of your circle, did not like Hephaistion’s position, and would know to avoid being found out, certainly. How, he did not have the brain to.”

“You truly think this?” Alexander’s eyes were caught by the reflections of the beads upon the wall, a mirror of silvered metal had been hung there and reflected the light elsewhere in the room to make it sparkle with light. An inexpensive decoration, it glorified Helios’ chariot in the daytime, making the burnished wood of the trunk shimmer with warmth.

“I do.”

“As do I.” Olympias had entered the new dwelling place, and her face was set with determination. “Welcome home, Cleitus.” From her side, Lanike was embracing her brother, swift feet having gone through the new room and across the tile of the floor under her peplos, dusty with the trip from the palace to the Villa. “I will allow Lanike to remain here.” His mother’s voice was commanding, and he could already foresee his obedience of her commands. “Alexander, Thais, Hephaistion, and I are to go to the temples to pray.” Her eyes scanned the rooms. “Where is Arrhidaeus?”

“You aren’t as worried as I had thought you would be about this.” Olympias observed, her footsteps keeping time and measure with Thais’ feet, and Hephaistion’s. Her voice she kept even, watching their complexions, how their faces reacted to the words from her mouth. Her peplos was of the same weight of cloth as Thais, and while not the black that peeped from under the cloaks that they had all wrapped around themselves, it kept her warm underneath the cloak. Hephaistion’s feet alone were bare against the ground, his ankles wrapped in the cloth that she remembered the Persian embassy to wear at time. The color was of the sea foam, and she knew very little of why exactly he wore it, but she could make a guess based upon how she was raised. “I would think that Barsine would be a threat to you.”

“Barsine avoids being a threat by virtue of being a nuisance.” Thais stated, her distaste for the other woman worming into the conversation. “She thinks that she and she alone is the only person of interest to those who don’t lay their bodies down.” Hephaistion was nodding. “When I enter the room, and my Lord’s eyes never leave me, she finds herself insulted, feeling as if she has lost power over the Prince.”

In the panorama of the mountains around Aigai, the thickets began to give way to the upcoming temples, and Hephaistion at last spoke.

“Barsine is hoping that if she proves her fertility and becomes pregnant, Alexander will marry her, regardless of that child’s parentage. First wife is usually a position of strength within a harem, and she’s angling for that position.” Inside the cloak his hands were clenching, Olympias thought from the cloth around the hands rippling from inner pressure. “She has forgotten lessons that were hard learnt by my mother’s mother, that entrapment through the gifts of Aphrodite end in my Lady’s flighting affection and anger. She is both the gentle wave and the pounding surf, that is something too often forgotten.”

“How are you dealing with her?” Olympias’ question was aimed at one but caught by the other.

“He’s dealing with her by ignoring her.” Thais had no issues with harem with Ptolemy, for which she was thankful, but hse remembered the politics in her father’s harem, and had no wish for similar shenanigans within her own life. Ptolemy’s wife was fully aware of Thais’ place in her husband’s life as a warmer of his bed and companion of his mind, but she recognized Thais’ lack of interest in her personal position. The reality was that Ptolemy’s wife had a different purpose in Ptolemy’s life than Thais. One was his legitimate bearer of heirs, the other was his help-meet in life. There was a difference in the place between Barsine and Hephaistion, both trying to fit in the same person’s life and Barsine’s belief that she had to take the whole of someone’s attention. “She cannot talk against Hephaistion to Alexander, he will not be off his guard enough around her to let her kill him, and she sees him as wholly a threat.”

“Greetings.” “Greetings.” They were walking among the others now, other worshippers and through the arched doors and into the cool area of the sanctuary. Enclosed by stone and nestled into the foothills themselves, the individual shrines were each in their own nook, barely ten worshippers filling the sanctuary only half complete. “May you walk well among the stones of the gods.” That was an alternative wording that he had not heard in a great while, Hephaistion thought, and his eyes shifted through the sanctuary for the speaker of greetings, unable to identify a speaker. As he looked through, he stood with Thais and Olympias to disrobe: they removed their cloaks and he his own cloak, standing in the thin pants with his chest bare. His feet padded bare upon the flooring of the cave-like sanctuary, the path to Aphrodite’s shrine here a familiar one to him.

“May Hermes hear my prayer, bear its words to the ears of the gods.” Olympias encanted, her voice going sing-song and her knees kneeling on the pads that covered the floor of the shrine to Dionysus. Hermes, the messenger could find Dionysus whenever his feet and music danced. “Bear my words to the ears of Dionysus, giver of the divine madness, revealer of truth and giver of ecstacy.”

Prayers given to a god directly were less effective than prayers addressed to Hermes, for whilst the gods knew the humans, they were not all Hermes, who heard and gave messages, many of the gods involved intimately in the affairs of the few rather than with knowledge of the many.

“Praise be to Apollo, who gave the gift of prophecy, and gave the gift of healing, and praise be to Asclepius whose hands directed the healing into my husband.”

“And praise be to the wife whose loyalty remains unshaken.” The voice came from behind her shoulder, a hand warming her collarbone as fingers curved around her neck. “Olympias, named for her husband’s victory at the Olympics.”

Into her vision the man walked, hair of bronze and eyes sparking in amusement at her surprise and bemusement at life. She could barely breathe a name out and into the air, knowing without doubt the god.

“I’ve a word that you will need, or your son will need in the future.” Hermes was smiling, smiling, smiling like a whore come into a pouch of silvers, a merchant with a promising sale, a man with a friendly body writhing in invitation. Teeth white and shiny in the doldrums of the cave.

“Praise be to Zeus, father of my son, father of the Gods.” Olympias finished her encanting, her prayers given in the presence of a god. “May Hermes give my well wishes for the fulfillment of my son’s health to his father, his protection to our son.”

“When did you know?” Hermes asked, his eyes on another praying form. “When did you realize that your son was a demigod?”

“I knew when he was conceived. Philip may have prowess in bed, but that night he was possessed.” Hermes smiled slightly. “When I watched him with Alexander, I realized the truth of it. There was more of a touch of the divine in his body then the blood of Achilles would gift him with.”

“Why do you ask for protection for Alexander?” Hermes moved to lounge against the statue of Dionysus, hips and shoulders aligned, a gauntness of body stretched under Persian trousers and a slender profile made her worry as to his viability, his strength of body for a second, even if divine will held him together, pulled his body and soul through his tasks.

“As Pausanias failed, Alexander’s life has been threatened by the turmoil of the state. Polyperchon and Antipater seem to be even handed with their judgements and research, but I have heard that Attalus has written to Philip saying that Alexander should be killed before he gets ideas from Pausanias’ betrayals.”

“You are afraid your husband and your third parent of your son wills him dead.”

“I am afraid that for all my son has devoted companions who bow to his will, this disobedience of Leonnatus may do what nothing else would do. If the Carian interference did not push him into anger enough to order the death of Alexander, Attalus may think that this might finally open the way for his eventual possession of the throne through little Caranus.”

“Ah.”

“Praise be to Athena, she who intervened and left many children with a father, a kingdom with a king.”

“Ares nearly oversaw that afternoon in Philip’s life.” Hermes had moved all of his body away from Olympias, and was projecting his voice from where he had sauntered across the sanctuary, moving around bodies frozen in time, stopping to fondle a statue of himself, playing with one of the boundary markers. “Did you know that I never slept with the Lady Aphrodite, or had copious amounts of sex with her?”

“No.” The disambiguation persuaded Olympias to rise from the cushions within the familiar shrine of Dionysus, following the god as he wandered his way through the sanctuary. Now he was standing by Hephaestus, the offerings to the smith god few but what had been left there were richly appointed. A small pot of olive oil was one, the paintings on the sides of the urn that contained in delicate and complex, and as tiny as her thumbnail, a true work of art. “The guardians of boundaries are the _herms_ , and they have my most useful attribute imblazoned, jutting out from their bodies.” He had palmed his crotch, even if Olympias already knew. “And while I would love to use my own on you, Father said it was out of the question.”

A humming noise came out of Olympias’ throat, and she knew it definitely was not an answer or a question, rather a stop gap measure to avoid a cry of either fear or disgust. Hermes gave an air of power to the room, his feet on the stones only appearing as such as the air around his feet and legs vibrated with the force of his steps. The boundary markers were named after Hermes because he transcended boundaries, his footsteps walking from Hades to the plains and mountains and islands of Greece, to the peaks of mount Olympus and its hallowed halls, home to the gods who gave their allegiance to Zeus and their patronage to the Greeks, Macedonians, and Thracians.

Hermes carried messages because his feet could take him to any place that a message might need to be delivered. The feet stopped again, this time outside of the shrine to Aphrodite, his eye on the occupant inside, not frozen in time, but certainly kept separately as he prayed, knees on the floor, calves flat until bare feet cupped the back side resting on top of his ankles, chest doubled over again so that the front of his body brought his nose and hands flat to the floor. This was the influence of Inanna, Ishtar, and Isis on the temple of Aphrodite that he had been raised in, the obeisance of the Easterners to their kings and gods.

“No, the Hermaphrodites are not my children.” Hermes stated. “They are Aphrodite’s gifts, her husband’s creations. They are not always born of possession, but they have Aphrodite’s full gifts, and the _herms_ on their bodies to show that they cross boundaries, are not one or the other.” The prayers went on, and Olympias heard a familiar echo that she had once heard at his mother’s temple. “But as I was saying. Ares nearly had the day, and then Zeus decided otherwise. Ares’ wages wars, but Athena plans them, and the gods of the East are stirring, even as the borders of Macedonia rumble with coming battle.”

They were again in the shrine to Dionysus, and Hermes had his hands on the pipes that the statue held, eyes glinting. “Alexander’s life is too important to us for Philip to die yet, there is a war that we need him to stand as general for.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ares could have kept Philip alive, but Aphrodite spoke so that Athena would, and Zeus followed her words of advice.” Hermes stated. “The battle to come will be fought with wisdom rather than brute force.”

“You said there was a word?” Sometimes the message was forgotten by Hermes, and he bent to whisper something in her ear, the slight confines of the shrine barely forcing him to take three steps.

“It is not all that will save him, but use it only in a time of need, mother of Zeus’ son.” As the sounds of other prayers echoed into her ears, Olympias realized that Hermes was gone, stepping through the air to another place, leaving her be.

Alexander would be king, if not of his mortal father’s kingdom, she decided, then of another’s kingdom.

“So what news of the villages?” Alexander had moved to a sitting area, Ptolemy and Cleitus joining Cassander at his side. Barsine had drifted into the area, left alone the duties of unpacking on this afternoon. Arrhidaeus’ absence, with the trunks and bags that he had been assigned to bring to the new villa was noticeable, but Alexander’s assumption was that the absence was due to distraction. With Cleopatra and their uncle Alexander still in residence in Aigai, the horses that would be the wedding gift had yet to leave the town. Those horses were certainly a potent distraction to Alexander’s brother, and even to Alexander, who missed the company of Bucephalus and the continuity of cavalry drills together. “And how did banishment serve you?”

“Banishment did not serve me well,” Cleitus’ eyes were dark, his memories on the troubles that he had mainly avoided, but the stability of his connection to Alexander now having turned to tumult. “though I enjoyed seeing Lanike in Epirus. You fled after my banishment?”

“Hephaistion’s sources worked to our advantage.” Cassander could not let his mild anger towards the man show, whose sources did not speak to him of Leonnatus’ treachery, causing trouble for all of them. “The King was speaking of having Alexander’s death on his hands, now that he had a potential _true_ heir, what with Eurydice pregnant again. That pregnancy was little Caranus¸and he was an heir. He was not yet born, but Europa was.”

“You thought that he would have you killed.” CLeitus’ disbelief echoed through the room. “You are the only heir who has been proven in battle.”

“Attalus has been proven in battle, and Caranus is his grand-nephew, Europa could have been used as _epikleros_ , mated to Arrhidaeus or Ptolemy once she bleeds.” Alexander acknowledged Cassander’s worries. “However, it was not that. Father believed that I was making a move for his position as king, first by securing a marriage abroad, and then by securing his position through assassination.”

“That you were trying to secure your position as heir was not thought of?” Ptolemy’s memories of Philip somewhat corroborated this reading of the king. “He would have eventually found that reasoning, but…”

“Hephaistion was afraid, as was Olympias, that I would end up dead. I left Pella within days of your banishment, but Amyntor called Hephaistion to his side as we were about to leave. He was kept here as ransom against my good behavior.”

“And as punishment,” Ptolemy knew this, remembering the reason for the banishment of himself and Cleitus. “for his role in the attempt to convince the Carian Prince.” Hephaistion had agreed to speak the words to the Prince of Caria that the princeling had asked him to, speak for the Companions as a faction. “What else happened?”

“I left Lanike and my mother in Epirus with my Uncle, and asked that he speak with my father regarding the quarrels. Alexander was willing to counsel my father to peace towards me, but would not argue on my behalf to my father, and asked that I leave Epirus, as if my father should move his views against me, he was not going to shelter me and bring Father’s wrath and armies against him and Epirus.” Those had been harsh days, left unaccompanied by his companions, it had brought him to worry.

Barsine drifted further into the room, the layers of sheer chiton revealing the lush body beneath, shadows of areas plump with pleasure, and Alexander reached for her, drawing her body with fingers wrapped round her wrists bedecked in bangles of copper to the seat of his lap. Sprawling her, he looked over her body, drawing a possessive hand down the fabric, roughly groping at the breast underneath the top and above the belted rope before laying that hand on her rump, keeping her pinned as he played with the skin and fabric.

“So what news of the villages?” He asked again, eyes on Barsine’s catlike smile of enticement, her legs curling against his laps. “I had heard that you were found by my father’s men in the same place?”

“The villages wonder at their survival of the winter. There are rumors of pox among the mountain sheep, and mutton being far less available come the snow, let alone wool. Whilst a corpse of sheep can be shaven, the worry would be that it is contagious.” Cleitus watched the woman on his Prince’s lap, her eyes sparking in the darkening light of the sitting area, out in the courtyard of the villa as the sun sunk in Helios’ chariot, bound home for the evening. Soon the servants would come to light the lamps to allow them to see each other as Night reigned over the world.

“The stories of the pox are true.” Alexander had heard Polyperchon speak of it, heard Hephaistion’s reports on it, his contacts with the temples confirming that the mountain temples knew of pox, and that the soothsayers and visionaries alike saw sheep strewn on mountainside, mutton wasted in the burning fires of safety. “There is a plague among the sheep, and there have yet to be signs of it among humans, but the sheep are ill in some places. Father talks of quarantine of the sheep and shepherds with infected sheep to deal with this, Attacles has issued orders that any of his father’s sheep with pox or the early signs of it be separated from the flock immediately. Perdiccas and Harpaulus went to the mountains to deal with the pox in the flocks they own there, or tried and got caught immediately. Apparently this infestation may be abnormally bad.”

“There are riots for food beginning in some of the towns in the foothills, even though there has yet to be scarcity.” Ptolemy reported. “They are really the worry that the King is dead and that no one has taken the kingship publically expressing themselves through other worries.” He had thought of the corpses that he and Thais had seen carried through the town, the soldiers who had stepped in to protect a garrison’s food stores against rioters and received death for their protection. “That fear needs to be assuaged soon.”

“What of the towns on the borders? Hephaistion has heard reports that even temples that gave allegiance to Philip are considering withdrawing it and supporting those that would have full autonomy again.”

“He is right on that,” Cleitus thought it different than those who would have full autonomy again as their reasons. “but I would think that the raised amounts of the gifts he expects are the true problem. The hegemony is shifting on the amount of fealty they are willing to pay as no violence has been brought against them, instead it being brought against Persia.” There was a third reason, one that he was uncertain of bringing up. “I have heard that Ares has walked among the people of those towns, his smile causing the dogs of war to cry for the meat of battle.”

“Athena stepped in at my sister’s wedding, to protect Father’s life.” Alexander’s fingers dug deeply into her ass as she moved the bone of her hip against his groin, playing with newly awoken flesh from the touch of that rounded bottom. “Pausanias was gods’ touched when he died.”

“That is also worried over.” Ptolemy knew that the actions of gods were less of logic and more of divinity, their actions not ruled by progressions such as they had learned from Aristotle’s teachings so many years before. “She did not strike him dead, only moved his hand. Philip’s life was left in the hands of the Fates rather than the hands of the gods. What if the blessing of the gods were on Pausanias’ actions, and he was killed? His body has disappeared, there are those who are saying that it has been brought to the halls of the heros as one who worked the gods wills.”

“What if the body disappeared because Polyperchon had it placed into storage until his investigation was over with?” Hephaistion’s voice came from the door, his bare feet stained with the dust of the road and the clothes he had worn to the temple silhouetted in the light from inside the villa and the blue of the twilight as it embraced Aigai. “The gods didn’t take it, Polyperchon has it closely guarded so that it is not desecrated or given a hero’s burial or revives with divine will without his knowledge.”

“You know this for fact?” CLeitus was nodding in understanding at Hephaistion’s information, and Cassander’s silly question.

Any answer to Cassander’s question was disturbed by the servants entering the courtyard with tables, clattering against the paving stones as they placed the tables in front of each couch, and laid the spread for dinner. Alexander watched as a set was placed in front of an empty sofa, anticipating Hephaistion’s place as Thais went through the courtyard and sunk onto the flagstones in front of Ptolemy’s feet, receiving a kiss from him on the forehead before she was drawn up to sit on his lap.

“Set Hephaistion’s place in front of my seating!” Alexander shouted, the blush that then crept across his beloved’s cheeks and stained his chest making him laugh. “My blessing, come to me.”

Barsine was left on his couch, but pushed such that she was leaning against his shoulder and not on his lap at all as Hephaistion approached, walking as if the waves were a part of his feet, his hips swaying. Around the waist Alexander noted a slender chain of silver that drew his attention downward and illuminated the lack of tan or hair on his body, left unshaven. Once he reached Alexander, Alexander was pleased to see him emulate Thais and kneel to the ground, obeisance or amusement, Alexander couldn’t tell.

“I bring the gifts of Aphrodite to you.” Hephaistion encanted, speaking word that his mother had said to her lovers, a priestess bringing the blessings of her goddess.

The blessings of Aphrodite were stolen from his voice into the warmth of the body leaning against him, a hand on his jaw as Alexander cupped it and their noses bumped. They flowed from one body to the next, the gifts of Hephaistion’s goddess accompanied with warmth and the taste of the honey that had been a part of Alexander’s earlier pursuits sweetening the reception of the gift.

As Alexander drew back, Barsine made a moue of discontent, her disturbance noted by the others in the room, eagerly by Cassander whose covetous nature was known as was his lust for flesh of a certain taste. Perhaps he had a chance, Cassander wished, but then dismissed.

“Thank you for the gifts given, Hephaistion, both yours and Aphrodite’s.” Alexander repeated the words that he had once written to Nessa of Aphrodite for, ritual words that were not much used outside of those taken in by the temple. There was a covenant between Aphrodite and her priests and priestesses, and not only gifts of the Goddess were given when her devoted ones’ gave her gifts. “Dinner?” He removed a piece of bread, the olive oil soaking into it as he scooped olives from the bowl next to it.

Barsine could feel the horror of her place in her Prince’s bed being taken from her on this night, as the life within her body could potentially quicken, according to Eileithyia’s priestess’ advice. This was a night she could give him a child, and as the bread disappeared into Hephaistion’s mouth, those teeth chewed her chance of pregnancy away. Her bribery of the servants to place herbs and powders that promised her fertility and would enhance Aphrodite’s gifts would enhance her rival’s life, not her own.

As oil drifted out of Hephaistion’s mouth only to be intercepted, Barsine moved away from Alexander, whose tongue was taking it into where it had been destined.

“Go enjoy a bed!” Ptolemy’s hands were full of Thais’ body, and Cleitus was smiling in bemusement, Cassander’s lips stained with lust at the scene of the prince half pulling Hephaistion into his lap.

A rude word answered him, but Alexander left, a hand through the chain emphasizing that waist, pulling on it as if it would compel his partner onward as a hand on a bridled horse would move it.

“I guess that you will not spread your legs for the prince this night.” Thais spoke, her eyes on Barsine’s face, made ugly by the hiss of anger and jealousy escaping her mouth and mind’s discretion. “The gifts of Aphrodite go where they will, but the gifts of Hera are far more fickle.” Thais hoped that Barsine understood her warning, that those that went hunting for position through a man often found their position not what they hoped it to be, and that Hera’s jealousy of others was a death of the soul. Her love of all encompassing love, Thais realized, would not be understood by Barsine and her manipulations.

“I would guess that I am no longer needed here?” Barsine spat, rising from the couch and stalking from the room.

“So does anyone know where we are to be staying?” Cleitus’ eyes were on Cassander, who had attended Alexander through this. “And was Arrhidaeus sent from the court? He usually sits among us.”

The new rooms had the statue of Aphrodite tucked onto a shelf, her hands pulsing with the smoke that the servants had kindled in the incense brazier. The lamps lit her face with the stories of her power, calling the prayers out of the air from temples scattered from the North of the Aegyptian continent to the beginnings of the reach of the barbarians. This shrine was the shrine given to Hephaistion by his mother, years before, and the light that it held, was the light of Artemis, of Helios, of Hades and Olympus, trekked through the earth on the feet of Aphrodite as she danced, calling desire and passion with every touch of toe to ground.

She was also in the dance between bodies, as Aphrodite embraced her grandmother Gaia’s primordial dance with the sky, and her devotees acknowledged the power of that passion, that dance. On this night, with Alexander’s blood rushing with an urge to dance, to overpower, to take pleasure, to dominate, Hephaistion knew that Aphrodite would truly get her due.

So on this night, with his chiton being unpinned and tumbled to the floor, Hephaistion went to his knees. She was a much loving goddess who minded not sharing her worship with another. Aphrodite found her worship both in the prayers of her devotees and in their worship of other’s bodies and souls. On his knees with the wool of his chiton brushing his skin and cushioning the bones ground against the floor, he knelt, Alexander’s hands on his shoulder’s as he looked up at His King with devotion pouring through his body.

Alexander’s chiton was already dislodged from its normal fall down his thighs as the genitals underneath swelled with blood, the tip of which pointed out of the folds of cloth. He had been hard since before Hephaistion had been pulled across his King’s lap, and had been welcomed by hardened flesh and lustful gazes. That lust was now dripping against his face, and Hephaistion was glad that they had in the least possible amount of time made it into the bedroom. It had happened that he and Barsine both had been enjoyed by their prince in the open, in gatherings not just full of friends, but his experiences while his King was in self bred exile had given him a distinct distaste for the sensation, and he would quite happily never indulge in such open vulnerability again, except for his King’s will.

In the reality of his world, he was more likely to have to submit in such a way in public again, and most likely again in front of or even perhaps with the King. Philip’s will was absolute in Macedon, even if he ruled through a made consensus.

Lust was still brushing his cheek, and he moved his hands to clear the chiton away from his face, opening his mouth and relaxing his throat. The feeling of his mouth being fucked was not a sudden, or unexpected, and the burn against his throat as the phallus pressed to make more room than existed interfered with the physical manifestations of his memory of performing this act in the past. The slightly salty taste bit at his tongue, making him mindful that the speedier Alexander finished with this, the more mutually pleasurable the acts of tonight would be.

This room was not the same as the rooms in the palace, or even the rooms at Pella. This move to Aigai for the wedding had been a strategic move by Phillip, one that Hephaistion attributed to Philip’s thought that holding the wedding rebinding the alliance between Epirus and Macedon with the virgin blood of his daughter on his brother by marriage’s sheets needed to be held at the very heart of Macedon. Pella was the economic and social capital, but Aigai had been chosen as capital by the oldest kings of Macedon, and it was the true _heart_ of Macedon according to his mother. Nessa had said that it was at Aigai that the land took the king, as the land had recognized Philip as king so many years before, and come to him in the form of a goddess to wed them together. Marriages of politics weren’t just marriages of the King to women whose families held power in their homes, but that they were of the blood of those who had been recognized by the land in their homes. In proxy he wedded the land there, solidifying a claim of his children to that land, and in the case of Epirus, drawing himself more and more to the ability to subvert the land’s loyalty to its own king. Within a generation, he or his heir would hold Epirus.

The sea held no loyalties to a country. Poseidon might hold the cities along the sea as his own, and many of the islands had felt his presence, but his daughter’s wedded kings and slaves alike, and he sat at their wedding in equal dignity. Aphrodite’s love was more flighty, for she was born of the sea itself, a feminine power wedded to Poseidon but not always seen as such. The sea was Oceanus in some prayers, masculine son of Gaia and Khaos, and Oceania in other, twin sister of Gaia and primordial being submissive but untamed, certainly not monogamous. Aphrodite’s favorites were individuals, emotions, relationships, Poseidon’s favorites those who realized his might appropriately.

Gaia’s blessings of the kings were what gave them their power, Nessa had taught him as a child. A king rejected by the land might have war, famine, plague, drought as the land dried and desiccated as the love embraced the sunlight instead of the king. A king beloved of the land was fertile, or at the least his viable fertility was enhanced. Gaia could not bless anew what had never existed in loins, but she could help Demeter ignite the spark of a seed. Other gods were needed to mend or remedy a lack of fertility, Aphrodite, Athena, Eilythia, Artemis. Zeus would give the gift, Hermes.

Hephaistion’s lessons since then had been that while a king could be loved by the land, should he not wrong the land specifically, that kept him not from erring in other ways. And there, against the back of his throat, Alexander was thrusting far more fiercely, and the roots of his hair were aching as the hands that had dwelt on his shoulders had moved to his hair. Wrapping strands and chunks around powerful, thick and long fingers as Alexander drove into Hephaistion’s mouth, the force pulling at his scalp and bruising the skin as he gained his release.

No, this was not the rooms at Pella, where his knees wouldn’t be pressed into the stone floor, bringing blood to the surface at the difference of skin and bone, shocks of pain embraced by bone and not rushes on the floor. The shrine of Aphrodite made this place home, but this villa at Aigai was different, the furniture found in the reaches of the cellar here a luxury that they had recognized the use of. The wooden stand that had been gaining dust had been moved into the bedroom while Hephaistion had attended the shrines, and the rotted fixtures replaced with the leathers that had come with them from Pella. There were no rushes on the floor, but at home there was a matching padded bench, this one decorated with a pillow embroidered with the sun in full glory, Helios’ blessing on a house, a symbol of Macedonian kingship still seen if muted in the court.

No, as the orgasm of his king seemed to take the force of the sun, pouring into his mouth as if the rays of the sun were embodied in it, burning at the back of his throat, power here in Macedon was now ruled by the sun as weapon, through the power of sex. Subjugation of other countries through marriage, the force that it took to take a Hegemony of free city-states in Greece, that was the nature of the sun now in Macedon, patient coercion until acquiescence and threat. Alexander’s hands were tightening now, as his throat swallowed, the gold of his King’s hair shining as the sun would in the light of the lamps that illuminated the room and the shadows cast from the lamps that lit the courtyard.

It was as if Helios was filling him, calling from blood and seed the feeling of the sun within Hephaistion, thousands of spikes pressing against his skin, his stomach roiling, holding the fire of the sun in a place and a body that was of water, of cliffs and the harsh light of the moon, showing stark silvery life. His body, it wasn’t supposed to burn, and he couldn’t help but embrace the feeling, remembering the earliest days, the first flush of manhood in his friends as blood pooled in extremities. Lust had grown among them, and he had given his friend his mouth to slake that desperate desire, and Alexander had been so horrified when he had tried to bestow kisses upon him. Never had his blood danced in his body, even if it had sung in desire for Alexander.

No, this, this was different, as if he was slipping through the waves, and all his body was wet, not just desiring the orgasm that his King derived of his body, but something else. His thighs felt wet, and the kisses that hardened flesh has left wet against his face and down his throat, it felt not like that, but something different, something else, sweating and unconsciously he pressed his thighs together rocking against the sensation, falling onto the ground as what little control he had left crumpled.

“Hephaistion?” His eyes were open now, and he could see the sky in Alexander’s, kneeling thighs and a hand on his face. “Welcome back. I think that you lost consciousness.” It had happened before between them, and Alexander kept close care of his possessions, and while worry was not new, the open affection was rare, something kept to amusing words or private rooms, conversations with friends. It had been something that he had wept for, silent in the bed not of his choice during that time of exile, memories of happier times at Mieza and that affection run wild in the air, in fumbling pleasures and experimentations with friends. “Hephaistion?” Next would be a question, something that Alexander had learnt of somewhere, and explained as his ability to check Hephaistion’s loss in their pleasures, in his devotions. “What had you eaten for morning meal?”

That barked out in laughter, cognitive abilities coming back in the growth of amusement. “I had not the time with the hassle of moving the complete hassle, and yet again, the only thing that has fallen from my mouth into my belly has been parts of you.”

“That cannot be healthy.” Alexander was amused, but knew the time to be correct. There was very little time that Hephaistion ever found freedom in, and food was not always the last thing to be discarded to make way for pressing matters. He was unable to forget to make sure Alexander ate, which was of use on campaign, and Alexander’s engagement with strategy abandoned common sense. “Would you have water?”

Hephaistion could still feel it, the warmth within his body, and he rolled his body such that he could see the length of his front rather than assume that what he felt was correct. Still flattened, the flesh of his genitals was not mirroring the hardening that had parted his body, but he was oddly glistening against the sweat that sex pulled from his skin. Alexander’s hand was tan, pressing against sun warmed skin and spanning the width of the stomach, and the eyes were shot with the lightning that lanced sky, desire quickening, and pressing the hands downward, changing his concern to a slowly meandering covetous smirk. No, Hephaistion thought, the offer for water was about to be refuted with brief sharp words and at the least he no longer felt as if his consciousness was dancing with a nap. “I would have water.”

There was a cup of water from the jar that the servants had left on a table near the bed, but there was a kiss to accompany it, hands curving against cheeks and a supportive arm around Hephaistion’s waist, a prelude that had his thighs slip against each other as he was walked backward, the cloth on the bed rubbing familiarly against his skin. Still the same chiton was left pinned on Alexander, askew with their play so far, but holding tight and Hephaistion went to unpin it. It took only a clenching of teeth to grasp the head, and a sharp pull, and Alexander reached to pull the pins away from Hephaistion’s mouth as his chiton fell to the other cloth, white stark against the warm browns, and the pins barely shining in the sparse light of the room.

The needles shone softly, and Hephaistion disregarded Alexander in this, they were lovely in the light, feeling as if they had the moon within them, and the glories that they brought against his skin brought a smile to crease his face. They were a pleasure unlike the pleasure of Alexander’s cock or fingers pressing and thrusting within him, sawing and pawing at that _spot_ inside that made him scream and quake like Alexander could when the orgasm fountained from him. Philip groaned and exploded, pressing and pushing and forcing through the orgasm like a bull, the cow a brainless thing beneath him as he rutted. No, Alexander was the stallion, taking the mare and dancing from her teeth and hooves with Barsine, enforcing his will upon the mare, but always looking for something lively.

They would dance along his skin, stuttering and making Hephaistion gasp as Alexander licked a train with sharp objects and quietly beading blood, coming apart around Alexander’s tongue and underneath it was as if he came home.

Eyes stayed on the needles even as Alexander wound an arm around his waist, moving him up onto his knees, his elbows held at parallel to his body as Alexander brought the edge of the needles onto skin. “Stay still!” One hand of Alexander’s was spread across his chest, his cock hard and pressing, brushing against Hephaistion’s groin and quivering as Alexander’s eyes narrowed. Alexander’s mouth was around a nipple bracketed by his hand, teeth biting the nipple into erect silent testimony, its mate filling with blood in sympathy. The needle was slid into a hole already carved into the flesh at the brink of the rose colored skin that decorated the peak of the pectoral, stretching and cracking the flesh as it pressed through and hung mid air. As the second needle pressed through the matching hole, Hephaistion keened with the sharp bite of the pleasure, and the renewed strange feelings in his groin. Arching with the pain, he felt Alexander catch at the needles with his teeth and pull against and away from his body, pulling a moan from his lips and a smile as Hephaistion’s eyes slid closed. “Eyes open!” Another order, and as he complied, Hephaistion’s mouth was caught again.

They courted Aphrodite’s desires with their mouths, and the gift she gave to him, it felt to him that Alexander was shooting fire through his body, nibbling at the lips with hot breath intermingling. Alexander pulled against the pins, taking the arched back and moving his beloved backward

Alexander could feel Hephaistion’s arch, the give of Hephaistion’s limp genitals curving around him as he thrust lightly against the other. The lines of his beloved’s chest were less defined than his own, and had never needed to be removed of the same hair that his father had in abundance, his own only decoration or embellishment instead of the thick thatch that covered his own groin and his father’s body from the shoulders to the thighs. The beads of blood flowed unhindered down smooth skin, and Alexander reached a hand out to the small bowl of olive oil left on the table by the bed.

The servants were used to his requests, and now left the bowl rather than deal with another broken lamp in his rush to penetrate Hephaistion or the play partner of the night.

He pressed inwards, oil gliding against skin still somewhat slick with the morning’s exertions as his first two fingers raked against the spot, the flesh and muscle around his hand dancing as Hephaistion moaned, keening with the feeling, hips pressing against the fingers. This was not the pleasure Alexander would derive from this, having had his own penetrations, pleasures through experimentations there, but the dulled version of his own knowledge of this joy.

He forgot the thrust home, slicked phallus into flesh left without any oil, but warm, moist, and incredibly tight. It felt as if the flesh around him was perhaps ripping open, and Hephaistion was moaning, the moan that he gave when Alexander had him bent over something of appropriate size and drew blood with the leather strap. No, this was a pained moan even as Alexander pounded into the willing body of his beloved, having fallen back against the bed with an arm beneath Hephaistion’s waist and an arm providing the leverage to piston his hips, the blood rushing through Alexander’s body calling him to thrust, and hammer until he lost himself in the peaking power as Hephaistion arched and shuddered around him. The blood smeared between their chests and was left unnoticed as the pins caught on Alexander’s chest hair, pulling free with every piston and press into willing flesh.

Alexander could feel Hephaistion melt around him, a keen perhaps disturbing those in the courtyard as his beloved came apart and the muscles around his cock clenched, pulling from him seed, Hephaistion bucking up into him as he softened. No, this form, Hephaistion abandoned on the bed, the whole of his body limp with the pleasures that had left him and eyes smiling with the smug satisfaction of Aphrodite’s love of her worship, this form was gorgeous. Bits of red silk caught Alexander’s eyes, and this was a new trigger as he moved slowly.

Not removing himself from Hephaistion was the goal, but the red silk ties set the gold of Hephaistion’s skin and bronze of his hair ablaze in the lamplight, and the bonds kept him safe. The chain around Hephaistion’s waist caught against the pins of his needles, holding his possession with symbology, and the crimson cloth kept a visual representation brought back a third time. Threes were numbers that his father forgot, Alexander knew. Three realms, three brothers, three Fates, three Muses, three Eumenides.

Three bindings, red silk, the things that held his mask together, and the chain that quietly reminded him of the base of his own personality. Alexander had things that were his, that was what the golden chain that he had enclosed his beloved’s waist after he had returned from exile reminded him. Hephaistion was one of them, blood drying darker than the silk wrapped around his arms.


	7. Part Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Conversations and Oaths. New information found. The Eumenides make a brief appearance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work is not permitted to be displayed except through An Archive of Our Own.

“There is a summons for Alexander,” the man at the door to the villa was no great surprise to the guards there, having changed shifts at sundown, and the sky was only now just getting stained with darkness. “do I have your permission to enter the household?” As it was given, he stepped inside, cloak wrapped tight around him against the cold. “Thank you.”

It started whispering through the household as he was shown into the main area, and one of the men in the courtyard came into the house to speak with him.

“You are here on Philip’s orders?” Cleitus asked, eyes on the livery of the King. “How have you been, Eumenes?” The information must be sensitive for the King’s personal secretary to be sent, even to summon his eldest wholly legitimate son.

“I’ve been better.” Indeed, the Athenian’s eyes were smeared with the paint of exhaustion, and his mouth had a distinct turn downward. His hair was uncharachteristaclly unkempt, not just from the wind that had started to rise and cause the lamps in the courtyard to gutter following dinner. “Welcome home, CLeitus.” They were not friends, but the secretary and the young Prince’s companions were less antagonistic towards’ each other than the secretary and the King’s companions. “The Prince has finished his move here?”

“Yes, he has finished. However, his brother has yet to join us here, which Arrhidaeus was going to do, and what he was carrying has not made it either.” Cassander had filled in what Alexander’s worries had conveyed. “Has there been any sign of him since the move?”

Eumenes shook his head, whilst there was knowledge, there were also orders not to disclose his information. “The summons is for the prince Alexander.” His King was insistant that Alexander come to his side, banishment from his business Eumenes’ punishment until he succeeded in that business. “Where is he?”

At the disregard of his question, Cleitus replied. “He has retired for the night, as have the servants, and the business of being interrogated summons me.” Indeed, Polyperchon was leaning against a wall, watching the interchange with a furled lip and sharp eyes. “The bed chamber is across the courtyard, the doors are veiled with white fabric stretched tight, as it would be over windows.”

“You greatly embarrassed Eumenes.” Philip’s smile was wry, tainted with blackness of temper. “What exactly did you do to the poor man?” What did he walk in on? It was left unsaid, but Alexander could read his father’s expressions.

“I was enjoying myself with an obliging and happy bed mate when he entered through the patio doors. He was perhaps startled by the throwing knife that nearly hit his throat.”

“It was the position that the Prince had his bed mate in,” Eumenes’ cheeks were blossoming with pink even as he thought on the matter, his eyes wide at the silken ties that had Amyntor’s son bound, the Prince’s teeth creating marks on the fragile skin. A drop of blood staining the abdomen from a knife left next to Hephaistion’s body, but tightly gripped by Alexander in surprise. “not the knife. If weapons of such sharpness scared me, I would not work for you, my King.”

“It could not be that my bed partner was male that surprised you, or an adult?” Alexander’s eyes were on the secretary, aware of the distinctions between the Athenians’ views of those who laid with adult males, or rather, adult men who laid down for others, and the underlying views of the Macedonians. The Macedonians were not the boy-lovers that the Athenians were, and had a preference for the full maturity was implicit in their society, and not the Athenians’ catering to their children and their children’s potential. The youth were the future of their society, but to spoil those youth was to ruin them. He would rather a tried soldier at his side than an innocent youth, one who knew his desires fully than one barely discovering them. “Or that he lay down for me?”

“It was rather that Amyntor boasted of finding an appropriate wife for his son in my presence.” Well, it was that. It was also the arching body and the pleasure in a surrender that Philip had once pulled from the same body with force or coercion.

“I wish him well of that.” Philip’s words halted the byplay. “Alexander, I need an oath from you. And Eumenes, I need you to leave my presence, having helped me from this infernal” His eyes were on the seating, and his eyes were like daggers, Alexander noted of his father. Bed rest was crippling mentally to a man who had not stopped in movement since he had learned to ride, to walk, started working with the military. “bed,” he practically spat. “and over to sit next to my son.”

Eumenes was visibly taken aback, eyes widening in shock, and body jerking at his liege’s words. With measured feet and breath he moved forward to stand in front of the bed, moving his torso to an incline and reaching out rounded arms to encircle the king, who braced himself on his secretary, levering to stand on the floor with shaky legs. While Alexander stood and backed out of the way, Eumenes moved from his complete control of his king’s body to a supportive presence at his side as the king wobbled towards the seating. As his father lowered himself on to a piece of seating, Alexander watched Eumenes back away swiftly, either fear of his king implicit in his body, or a new knowledge about the king’s sensitivity to his lack of mobility. Thankfully, from the grimace on Father’s face, Alexander thought that lack of mobility was seriously decreasing as the days went and the healing hands of Apollocles were blessed with the gifts of Asclepius.

“Thank you.” It reverberated through the room, and Eumenes fled from his king’s words, out of the room and out into the general area of his king’s suite of rooms, out to accompany the king’s new guardsmen. The soldiers might scare Eumenes, if Alexander was reading his Father’s secretary correctly. “So how have you been?” Idle chatter was not their gift, and it would not be a loaded question if it wasn’t his father asking. Philip’s knowledge of his activities came from Meda’s spies and the contacts that Eumenes’ had that answered to him, to his own spymaster’s knowledge.

“House arrest would be more effective, Father, if I wasn’t already under arrested movement with the rest of the town, the wedding party, ambassadors, and an entire foreign delegation, one of whom just became your son by marriage. I am under the impression that every day that the investigation goes on, Epirus becomes worried that you are dead and the king in your wake, whether I, Arrhidaeus, or one of your generals is holding uncle Alexander as hostage to their good behavior.” Alexander went through the reasons that his father had for his own discontent, to his spymaster’s knowledge. “However, I understand the worry of not finding the assassin, and Leonnatus’ status as one of my Companions, even if he wasn’t one of my more favored Companions would mean that I am a logical suspect in intrigues that would lead to attempts on your life.”

“You are always a worry to me.” Philip’s voice had deepened, going towards the depth of the battle ground bellow that enabled him to project his will upon his soldiers and against the enemy. It was a voice that had once cheered ‘Legitimate Heirs for Macedon,’ in his prescience at Eurydice’s pregnancy with young Europa. “I would will that you, as my son, tell me the truth of your involvement, or the involvement of those involved with you in any attempts on my life.”

It was a hard request to answer the whole of, his knowledge of any attacks given to his father, a man who hoarded secrets against those who would conspire against him only in minutiae, his true belief in brute force meaning that his spy masters had not the network, the breadth that even his son at his breach of maturity had already surpassed. For all that Eumenes heard thing of others who worked for others of power, merchants, lords, and Meda’s links within the women’s quarters were strong sources of information, the priesthoods were unsurpassed in both their quarrels with each other and their ability to share information concerning the secular world. Alexander knew that the stories of the Cyprian priestesses of Aphrodite having watched her walk from the waves and lay her hands on the statue of herself within the walls of the Mother’s temple there in benediction. Aphrodite had laid her hands on the head of a priestess at prayer before sinking into her statue at the side of the Mother’s statue were being discredited by many other priesthoods, but Nessa’s temple along the sea also had a story. The statue of Aphrodite in the temple had moved her hands from the touch of the seashell and placed them on the swell of stomach and heart.

“I gave no orders nor intimations that I wished you dead. I had fled the city of Pella and your court in fear of my life accompanied by my mother and your wife, the Lady Olympias, after my attempt to alter the Prince of Caria’s choice of Arrhidaeus for a husband to his daughter to myself in my half brother’s stead. That subterfuge was my last act against your will. No one within my circle of intimates has, to my knowledge or the knowledge of my spy master, chosen to work against you to the end of your death or the incitement of those who would rise against you.” There were more questions for him from his father, and Alexander breathed as they were asked and hoped that he had sufficient answers for the questions that Father would ask of him.

“What assurance do you have of what your spy master tells you?” Alexander hoped that Philip wondered of his assurance of the truth in Meda’s words, Attalus’ words, Antipater’s words, and in Eumenes stories. Were they truthful, and was Polyperchon’s investigation assured of the whole of the truth being implicit in what he found? “They are after all,”

“He, Father.” Alexander let his tongue slash through his Father’s denigrations of his Companions, of his beloved. “Hephaistion’s loyalties are without my questions, or Mother’s. He also swore an oath on this matter, that against you he would not act, save at my own explicit words.” Oath breakers were the purview of the Eumenides, the Gentle Ones. “He swore this when he assumed that position among my Companions, and this preceded the displacement of my mother as Queen of Macedon.”

“So his involvement and his honesty are without question to you?” Philip tried to cover his thoughts of Hephaistion’s eyes, widened in fear at his words, his orders, and the hands creeping over his body. “I would have your oath that you or yours won’t move against me.” Philip’s eyes, Alexander realized, were tense in many ways, as if the eyes were filled of worry about something.

“Only if I am able to add a few caveats?” The eyebrow of questioning was surprising. Philip would usually violently disagree with this. “I would need to be able to act against you, should you act against me.”

“Reciprocal action should you need to take action to save yourself.” Philip was nodding, and Alexander could feel his breath ease out in a sigh of relief. This would help him in the future, should their relations break down further, worse than the Carian incident.

“In the name of Zeus and on the gifts of Aphrodite, I hereby oath that me and mine will not act against you in any form,” Alexander could feel the magic in the words being encanted, gathering around them as the air vibrated, pulling the gods’ attention to the words spoken. The gods did not look kindly on those who spoke against oaths, who broke them and sent the Kindly Ones against those who went against them. “save that you act first against me or mine. So have I said in the eyes of the gods, so shall it be.”

“Heard and witnessed.” His Father echoed his words, and there were other words in the air. _Heard and witnessed. Heard and witnessed. Oaths made, Oaths taken, Oaths given. Heard and witnessed. We shall feed on the blood bled by broken oaths. Heard and witnessed. “_ So why give me the oath, Alexander?”

“I may not always like you, Father.” Alexander could feel the bite of blood under his teeth, melding with the faint taste of his beloved in his mouth. “But you are my father. I love you enough that I would not act against you like that. Assassination would make Macedon and the hegemony unstable, and unstable would not be to anyone’s benefit. I doubt you realize that the reason that I did not even think against your orders of the house arrest.” A worried shift of Alexander’s father led him to explain. “I’ve felt that the rumors of rioting could also lead into physically expressed anger against me.”

“You think that someone would want you dead?” Philip remembered Leonnatus’ body, bleeding on the floor after he had embraced his sword in the final death, not two feet from where he was sitting, a stain of blood still on the floor.

“Three months ago, while we were practicing drills in the courtyard in our complex at Pella, you were out on drills with the Army, Hephaistion tripped, and the sword that was supposed to be dulled for practice sliced through his forearm.” Alexander remembered the whitened knuckles as the blood had pooled out, eyes widening in terror as he held Hephaistion’s arm tight, trying to slow the blood flowing out. “The drills we were attempting would have killed me, should the sword have gone wrong.”

“I see.” How had his sources not told him of this? It was written on his Father’s face, the question that worried him, and it was a breath of worry that Alexander had for his Father, that he hadn’t heard of this. There was a distinct change in his father’s face, and a change of words would not surprise him. “When should I expect my first grandchild?”

“Why do you ask?” Alexander’s worry was that he was to be married to an appropriate woman, at least, an appropriate girl to his fahter’s eyes.

“I ask because by the time that the people recognized me as King, and not just the regent of my cousin, I had already had children. Not legitimate children, but children who were recognized by others if not myself to have sprung from my loins.”

“You are asking about proven fertility.” The fertility of the king was the fertility of the land, and an infertile king could mean a barren harvest, not just a nobility without heirs. Alexander remembered Hippocampais, her eyes luring him to pull her into his arms and place his hands open her.

“Yes. Arrhidaeus is not of the line of succession, he is too kind for our painful works.” The king must make painful decisions, abrupt decisions. “Caranus is far, far too young to have a child. You’ve just reached full adulthood, and no longer are a youth. You proved yourself in war at sixteen, as a capable lover at 18, but there has yet to be a child to prove that your seed is strong.”

“A child born.” He could remember the cries, the midwife coming out to meet him in Athens, the blood from her hands and arms merging with the earth beneath her feet, goddesses of the Earth repaid with blood for a lack of reverence. “Eileithyia held the way shut.”

“Who was the woman?” Philip nodded. Fertility proven, but not within his knowledge.

“An Athenian noblewoman. I stayed with her father when I ran from the court, after Uncle Alexander would not allow me sanctuary in his court.” Hephaistion knew of this, knew of all of it, and Alexander was unsure that he had managed to assuage his beloved’s worry that he was not always to be welcomed, if not cherished to be in his bed. “I took her to wife, at her father’s urging, and she had reached full term, but she and the child died in the birth.”

“Sir?” It was Eumenes in the door way, his eyes full of tension, a hand clenching into the doorway as a ruckus sounded in the main room as his orders were verbally disabused. “Polyperchon has news of the latest interrogations.”

“Is it important?” Alexander was already on his feet, and Polyperchon had pushed past Eumenes and into the room to answer Philip’s questions.

“The latest questions answered speak of a conspiracy.” Polyperchon made it into the room to stand in front of the King’s seated figure.

“Was the money worth it?” Polyperchon had the sack of coins in his hand, his eyes on an attaché to the Athenian ambassador whose pronounced shiver at the word interrogation had now graduated to a full body shiver of distaste. “Was it worth it?”

“One of the legislators sent it!” The ambassador squealed. “He has wanted the Hegemon dead for since the Hegemony was declared.” There was a gulp of air. “I had nothing to do with it!” He was breathing hard, and Polyperchon raised an eyebrow.

The man’s chiton was stained with sweat, and the stink of nervous men had already convinced him to nervousness. This room had held so many interviews that they were beginning to blend, and it was lucky that he had kept notes on the most of it, Polyperchon knew. Otherwise, he would have forgotten who he had already spoken to, of these underlings. This one was different, his protests of innocence and the bag of silvers a contradiction.

“Nothing to do with _what_ , exactly?” The man’s nervous eyes were following Polyperchon’s fingers on the hilt of his dagger, squinting in the light of the lamps.

“The ambassador asked for the money, said that Demosthenes ordered it, and then he had me keep it secret. Keep it safe.”

“Why do you still have it then?”

“He gave it back when that man, Leonnidas, Leonnatus, whatever, was killed.” The attaché was breaking. “Said that Demosthenes could handle hiring an assassin, he wasn’t leaving a money trail in an enclosed city, and that the turmoil of the succession wasn’t worth getting caught right now.”

“You mean that the ambassador was involved in the assassination attempt.” Polyperchon was watching the man, whose bottom lip was already swollen with words left unspoken and worries clogging at the inside of the man’s chest.

“I mean that the ambassador has hosted meetings at the behest of his sister’s husband’s patron, and attended them, and two of the men who were involved made attempts on the Hegemon.” He blurted, and then covered his mouth with his hands.

“Can you give me names?” Polyperchon leaned forward, placing his hands on the shoulders of the attaché. “I’d speak kindly for you when your Hegemon and my King makes judgements.”

“Only some.” The man was quivering again, and Polyperchon was quite happy that Eumenes was not this much afraid of the others. He could deal back what verbally attacked him, this _child_ had stained his chiton with acrid liquid. “Only some. I am only attaché, not trusted with names. My father is secretary, he would have been trusted, but he was sent to Athens with messages two days before the wedding.”

“Some names are better than no names.” Polyperchon could see those names speaking more names to him, from their names only, to the owners of the names sitting before him in the chair as he spoke the questions that answered the rest of the names. It was a good day, and the King must learn of this. “Oh. What is your name?” The attaché was the third sleeping in that room, a room that housed four servants of his level. He couldn’t remember exactly which he was, but there was another attaché in that room who answered to the Athenian ambassador.

“Themistices.”

The meal that met the dawn was not yet to the full of the time, instead he had left the bed chambers at the villa and dressed. The silk of the bindings had been left coiled on the bed, and not for the first time, Hephaistion was glad that their _play_ hadn’t gotten as far as he had wished for earlier in the evening. Whilst he truly enjoyed that stricture in his pleasure, when Alexander was called away, and he was deep within their pleasures, it had sent him to his knees at his Lady’s altar to subdue the pain within his heart and mind.

He had instead abandoned their blankets, unable to sleep and moved out to the main area where Cassander was speaking with Ptolemy, Thais, and Cleitus in hushed tones. The remnants of dinner had yet to be collected, and Hephaistion had taken some of the olives left in one of the bowls to eat on a thick piece of breath on the abandoned seat. He had joined the laughter, remembrances of happier times and jokes that had been learnt recently. Cassander had recounted the story of his fall in practice and the sword that had suddenly become sharpened when they had been dulled apurpose for practice, and then Ptolemy had moved Thais to the side, moving forward and leaning into his own personal space.

“Have you kept up practice, then?” It had started such the debate of who was best with swords, and if repetitive practice without the same breadth of partners might not breed misbehavior that didn’t help those practicing. “Why haven’t you joined the usual practices?”

“We do,” Cassander had assured, but his bit lip of disapproval or obfuscation of fact had led Cleitus to finish his sentence when he would have trailed off. “but Alexander does not think that we should give away our whole hand to those who might or might not be against us politically.”

“You would rather appear a soft target, so you do not practice to the full extent of your skills, and thus do not stretch them or keep them honed?” Cleitus’ skills with tactics had shone under Alexander’s direction, and the disdain was cast upon the idea.

“Arrhidaeus has considerable skill with a knife.” Cassander defended his Prince. “And none of the court know of it.”

“They know of it,” Hephaistion’s defense was different. “but they are not able to distinguish that he is a skilled healer of animals with that knife of his and that the same knowledge of anatomy means that his knife could bleed a human dry swiftly.” Cleitus was smiling at the picture, large Arrhidaeus with his gentle hands that had helped Alexander truly gentle his war horse to battle with his knife not set to expunge a wound of the liquids of illness, instead set against another’s throat.

“Match.” He choked out. It happened on occasion, in their private dinner parties. They would challenge each other to a match, usually of verbal argument or a game of chance, occasionally to a bout of weapons’ play. “It is a brilliant veil for your strengths, but do you keep up the skill that should be hiding behind that veil?” His hand was on the sword that had accompanied him into the villa. “I would have you take me with weapons.”

Ptolemy went to speak to the guards as to their intentions, warning them of the impending clatter of metal and cries of pain and exhaustion.

“Done.” Hephaistion agreed, and Cassander helped him push the furniture to the edges of the courtyard and bolster the lamps that had barely illuminated the courtyard to a much higher strength. Hephaistion went to the bed chamber again, removing the top of the trunk that he had personally assured made it to the new rooming area. Out he lifted the sword that he had been gifted as he had left his mother’s temple, a plain blade without ornamentation or especial implementation, other than its reception of the blessing of a Head Priestess of Aphrodite, and it was buckled into place. The dagger was of the same pattern, with a plain pommel and a clean blade, a blood groove noticeable in the light from the courtyard. “Are you ready?” It was a few steps from the bed chamber and into the courtyard again, and with every step, he could feel the bite of his Prince’s teeth and the thick carved wood against his back. The bruising was not severe, but the change in his intentions for the evening had his body in full revolt.

“Yes!” Cleitus answered him as he came out of the inner parts of the apartment with a word and a sword moving against the wind and towards Hephaistion’s neck, singing against the air until it hit a dischordant note and Hephaistion’s sword, pushing against it as Cleitus was pushed backwards. “Not a proof of skills.”  
“Just a proof of maintained wariness and reflexes.” Hephaistion was already moving again, moving his body to almost dance around the older man.

“Oh? What of pure luck?” Hephaistion ignored the invocation of Chance as the cause of their equal bout, feeling his feet against the flagstones of the courtyard as the length of his pants allowed a different sort of movement than Cleitus’ short chiton. His Persian like style could tangle between his legs, and Hephaistion kept that in mind as he moved low to counter Cleitus’ thrust at his chest.

“I thought that you had said you practiced?” Cleitus was watching HEphaisition, who was moving parallel to the ground and under the sword.

“Oh?” A gasp of air as Cleitus lost his ability to retort as his newest attack was repelled, then regaining it. “I have practiced. What have you practiced? Dancing?”

Hephaistion was spinning away from Cleitus’ moving forward, sword trying to cut his arm this time, using the flexibility and avoidance of his sparring partner against him. Hephaistion stepped backwards as Cleitus lunged, feeling a protest in the muscles radiating up along his torso as he twisted.

Capturing Cleitus’ sword, this time trying to slice across Hephaistion’s torso, moving his torso such that he was diagonal to the ground and Cleitus’ sword was held between dagger and sword. Twisting the sword with his blades, Hephaistion sent the sword clashing against the ground.

“That was interesting.” The heavier voice of a man accustomed to getting his own way on a battle field and the smoke of a room filled with other people echoed across the room. “Since when have you been back?”

Cleitus bowed to Hephaistion, hands on his thighs as he processed the unwelcome voice. Instead of his answer, Ptolemy’s status as a son of his father rescued him from having to answer, and risk offense.

“We were summoned by King Philip, Amyntor.” The curve of his lips belied his distaste, and Ptolemy’s hair was the same dark shade as Amyntor, Philip, CLeitus, and Antipater, but unlike his friend’s father, his hair was not yet decorated with silver strands. “Can you say that you were invited to this home?”

“It is the residence of my son.” Amyntor cast his eyes on the oldest fruit of his loins, chest bare in the night, and slight steam rising from his shoulders as the heat of the battle met the ice of the night. “I am always welcome there.”

The shove that sent the dagger back into its sheath on Hephaistion’s belt echoed through the courtyard and kept him from speaking. “Would you speak with me, Father?” The sheath’s reception of the sword ended Hephaistion’s sentence, his mild words at odds to the force of his handling of his weapons.

“Yes.” A look at his son. “And put on a cloak.” They were similar in facial build, but only barely. The high cheekbones were sharpened on Amyntor, scraping flesh across the face and over a large jaw. Hephaistion’s eyes were wider than his father’s, and breadth and width of body on Amyntor had translated to a far more slender, well-proportioned body on the son. “We will be walking through Aigai.”

“I see.” Hephaistion’s father had taken him from his mother’s temple when he had barely reached the age of puberty, and whilst he had yet to breach it himself, he was of the age of maturity now, having left youth behind without the growth of hair upon his body.

They matched steps out of the villa and past the soldiers, who nodded at the familiar general’s assurances of his oversight of Hephaistion. As he wasn’t under house arrest, it was merely a politeness to give them that, and the packed sand of the street soon was under his feet, Hephaistion thinking on it as he tried to collect his thoughts. Amyntor had been travelling to Athens as a youth barely of the age of maturity attempting to make his mark on the world without infringing on his older brother’s place as heir to his father’s _oikos_. He had been on the road near the temple to Aphrodite by the sea when he had heard of the temple, and upon his realization of the day of the year, he had thought to present himself to the temple.

On the day of Aphrodite’s star’s reign of the skies, Amyntor knew that the priestesses of Aphrodite brought a man into the bed chamber of Aphrodite. That man would receive the blessings of Aphrodite as Aphrodite’s consort upon that night. He had badly misjudged what he had intended on doing, for while Amyntor’s body was the consort of Aphrodite’s priestess, Aphrodite had taken the body of her priestess, and her chosen husband had taken her to bring blessings upon the land. Reunited, the harvest was good, but a child was blossoming as another part of that harvest.

His passage through the temple when he had returned from Athens with a wife and the new knowledge of the death of his brother without issue had surprised Amyntor. Met by Nessa with a child affirmed to be his, he had let her keep the child still clutching at walls to walk and he went to his new possessions in Macedon with money made from trade.

Athenian beliefs had conquered him, and when he realized the power that the sons surrounding the son of the King could wield, Amyntor had sent for his son.

“I want an heir.” Abrupt statements of things that they had argued over before. “I’ve picked out an appropriate wife for you, the daughter of my brother whose death allowed me to take the holdings as my own. Amynta is quiet, biddable, proven to be fertile.” Amynta was three years older than Hephaistion, he had attended her espousal at age fourteen to her first husband. She was quiet, and had been scared enough that her eyes were white almost completely at the wedding as the veil was removed by her husband, who was of an age with Amyntor. He had heard from one of the priestesses of Athena that Amynta had prayed for the death of her husband with a bruised body many times. The two children who she had born him were both girls, and exposed at her husband’s refusal to accept them as children.

“I’m not of an age to marry.” He wasn’t, Athenian men might marry this young on occasion, but rarely until they were a decade past maturity, unless they were of the underclasses, or lived in the Piraeus. He was of Macedon, and they might not be of the morals as the Athenians, but still this was _too young_.

“You are two years past maturity, Hephaistion, and you have already spoken for the whore’s son to woo a wife.” His voice had a few of the townspeople stick their heads out of the window in question of the echo from the street at this hour. “I am your father, and you need to marry for the _oikos_!”

“I am not a member of your _oikos_!” He wasn’t loud enough to echo, but he remembered it as well as he had two minutes from hearing it, his presentation to the king. _My King, this is Hephaistion, my son born nine months after I received the blessings of one of Aphrodite’s prostitutes. You had wanted one born of my loins for a hostage? Have him._ Son of a prostitute of Aphrodite? Nessa had become the second to the Head Priestess when he was five, and two months before he was brought from the temple to Pella, she had mourned the death of the Head Priestess and her ascension of the position. “I am illegitimate. I was born of a temple, not of your wife.”

“You could be.” The threat was stated¸ and then rebuffed.

“I have not reached,” Hephaistion did not want to state it, would not state it. “It is impossible for me to wed.” A lie, and mistruth, a lie. “I have made vows.”

“Made vows, monogamy to that blonde haired freak for whom you lie down?” It was the crux of their arguments, again and again.

“Made vows to Aphrodite. I walk the path.” He didn’t specify which, and he had made vows. But not vows against marriage. Rather a binding of his path to his King’s path, no matter that his King was not the King yet. “ I am not of your _oikos_ , only your pawn. You’ve called me that in the past.”

“I would have a grandchild married to one of King Philip’s line.” Hephaistion avoided the thoughts of victory at his father’s admission of his reality. The child would be yet another pawn to his father’s plan. “I would that one of my blood one day sit on the throne of Macedon, my mouth to the ears of the gods.”

 _Heard and witnessed_. It echoed through the air, vibrating as an oath was made, or rather as a wish was verbalized and the magic of truths caused Hephaistion to shiver, his understanding of some things seeing that one of his father’s blood would one day sit on the throne of Macedon, but that the blood involved was not contained.

“And how is Caranus?” She had walked to the Queen’s rooms following her expulsion from the Prince’s nightly affections, her thighs drying in the night air as her arousal had dissipated and her anger had bubbled. _He_ had walked through the door, and barely words later, and that mockery had dispelled Alexander’s lust for her. Oh, she could feel his lust, remembering the hardness against the gauze of her chiton, but once _he_ had arrived, she had lost her time in Alexander’s bed, the lust that she had worked and bribed wasted on a man, in a belly unable to quicken with child the seed that was supposed to be hers was spilt. “How is the little darling?”

Barsine _hated_ children, almost as much as her anger against the interloper in her creation of an heir for Alexander, a boy child that would have him taking her to wife. Her murder of King Philip would assure her reward from her masters in Babylon, and the babe that she had yet to bear would insure her life in Alexander’s court. The girl in front of her was unable to wield the power that her babe gave her, dangling on her uncle’s strings and doing his bidding for a name and the affections of the many.

Eurydice was garbed in a chiton, fine blue fabric with thin lines of embroidery along the hem that brushed the floor as she sat across from her in the women’s quarters in her Uncle’s apartment. Her legs were demurely crossed, and her handmaiden was sitting at the end of the room, an ear in the children’s nursery.

“Caranus is well, he smiled at me today.” The handmaiden shook her head. “She says it’s just the passing of air.” Eurydice indicated the handmaiden. “Said that I did the same thing when I was Caranus’ age.” The handmaiden was the gosling’s nurse, Barsine recalled, hiding the sneer.

A cry broke from the nursery, and the former nurse hurried out, returning with a baby. She knelt at her Lady’s side, whose arms went out automatically, scooping the baby up and to a chest swiftly displayed with the removal of several chiton pins. “Ohh,” the girl whined, the babe latching onto a swollen breast with visible vigor. The breast was almost taut, and Barsine shuddered with that thought. This was the reason for a wet nurse, to avoid such indignity and pain that the lack of nursing caused in one who nursed the babe at the teat. “Oh, I apologize. It’s just that he needs his dinner.”

“Oh, I get that. The little Prince needs food, and he can be brought to dinner easily whilst you can keep up a conversation.”

“Oh yes,” Barsine watched the girl play with the babe’s wrappings, trying to coax a small hand away from her breast to circle and grip a finger. “why had you come?”

“I thought that I’d ask as to the health of the little King.” Barsine used the words. The babe might make king for a few days, but the man who would rule was on the Persian front, where the agents of her father and the men she reported to thronged, reporting not only on the movements of Attalus but the rumors that Marduk had been spotted in the area. The Hellespont was acting up according to the latest report from the spy master, the monsters there incited by something, and it had taken the lives of several fishermen. “The health of the little King’s mother is also of interest. Queen Mother.” She watched the words catch the eyes of the gosling dressed out in expensive garb, and smiled at the acceptance, the greed of the eyes. “My mother once killed a rival,” she knew to give the girl very blunt tips rather than anything subtle. “with a blade as slender as a needle. In the right place, a pillow could even kill a baby. You are careful with the King?”

Comprehension dawned in the gosling’s eyes, and Barsine wished that all things happened this easily.

“I am careful with the king.” Eurydice switched the baby to the other breast and fed him her nipple, sighing in relief at the suction. “I am most careful with the little king.”

“That’s good.” If one wanted something done, one did it oneself. If Eurydice wanted to become Queen Mother, she could make it happen if she placed her mind to it, however small it was. Greed usually made one’s will sharper. “One wouldn’t want the little king to become the King too quickly.”

“Too true.” Eurydice replied. “Well, I am quite well, and Caranus gains vigor with each passing day. Thank you for your concern.” Eurydice smiled. “My handmaiden will show you out, I have a great deal of thinking to do.”

“I thought that I’d ask as to the health of the little King.” Sitting in his own rooms, Attacles could hear the conversation in the women’s’ quarters, straining to hear against the crackle of the fire in the main sitting area. It was the unfamiliar woman again, with the hint of Persia in her voice. “The health of the little King’s mother is also of interest. Queen Mother.”

“My mother once killed a rival,” why would this woman confess to such things? If conspiracy was the name of this game, they would have to be careful, or more careful. Not all listeners would be as unaffected as he was with their conversation. “with a blade as slender as a needle. In the right place, a pillow could even kill a baby. You are careful with the King?”

“Sir?” Dymenes was at the door. “There is news as to Arrhidaeus.”

“I thought he was voluntarily joining his brother under house arrest?” The horse master had taught him to ride, filling in education left lacking by his own father in his urban upbringing at their house in Pella. Attacles had enjoyed the company of the younger man, who in turn enjoyed his brother’s company separately. They were as close as they could be, but one was legitimate and the other not, which left a gap between their stability of life.

“I am careful with the king.” Attacles could hear his cousin speaking as he was distracted by this news, standing from his seat and walking to the doors out into the courtyard. His bedchambers had this entrance, but the nursery next to him did not. In the shadow of trees outside, he could see another silhouette, sitting on the inner courtyard’s large fountain, a hand in the water. “I am most careful with the little king.”

“He was supposed to,” Dymenes relayed the information. “however, he was found this evening, having been attacked by unknown assailants, and taken to the healers.” Attacles could feel his secretary’s eyes on his back, the worry and concern flooding the room. “He has yet to wake.”

“That’s good.” The Persian woman was speaking to his cousin again, her words the opposite of what he felt on this news. He had never told his closest friend what his father had not _neglected_ about his education. “One wouldn’t want the little king to become the King too quickly.”

“Is there anything else?”

“Too true.” Eurydice replied, her familiar shrill voice sending his shoulders into a protective hunch.. “Well, I am quite well, and Caranus gains vigor with each passing day. Thank you for your concern.” Eurydice probably smiled. Harmodia had drilled those manners into her head, and it was something the brainless twit could do, Attacles knew, but anything past pleasantries was beyond her ability to speak well. “My handmaiden will show you out, I have a great deal of thinking to do.”

“Oh, I had the man who had heard something of our conspirators, that third son of the King, attacked.” The accented Greek set his teeth on edge, and Attacles could feel his temper boiling as the doors closed as the woman exited the apartment, assisted out by Harmodia. “He is a danger to Caranus’ inheritance, after all.”

Attacles knew that he couldn’t afford to give away the last bit of secrecy he had about the apartment’s layout, and he went through the main of the apartment and into the women’s quarters.

“You have received letters from Father.” Loud voice, and Eurydice was shying away from him.

“Uncle, does, after all, like me more!” The chittering voice echoed again, and Attacles winced. “What should you care of my doings?”

“I should care because if you do something stupid, you doom us all.” Attacles knew of whole families wiped out in retribution for the crime of one individual. He would much rather not be dead. “And letting that mad dog have a say in this is wrong.”

“What do you care of her?” Eurydice’s shoulders were clenched, and Caranus was in her arms, her hands having turned to angered claws. “She cares for me.”

“She acted against the one member of the King’s line who has not ever been implicit in any politics or scheming.” He was gulping in anger. “Arrhidaeus is a threat in that many of this court like him, and more like him than like his father!” HE was heaving with distemper, and Attacles couldn’t say it without being incredibly blunt. “Polyperchon is already searching. An attack on Arrhidaeus means that you may end up dead, Eurydice. And take all of us with you.” HE couldn’t stand the woman any more. “If you are to plot, close the windows and the doors onto the courtyard.”

“Why?” Eurydice asked. “What business is it of yours?”

“Voices carry through the courtyard, woman.” He went out the door. “How did you think that I had heard you?”

Attacles stepped through the courtyard, heading to the fountain. His head went into the cool water, hoping that the water hitting his skin would calm his thoughts and ease his mind. It would not salve his heart or his worry, but it was a strong attempt.

“Attacles.” There was a hand on his shoulder, and his name echoing through the water, almost magnified instead of silenced by the water. It certainly wasn’t distorted, and Attacles pulled his head from the water to look at the one behind him. “Attacles.”

“Yes.” He couldn’t recognize the face, but that was a familiar form, a familiar member of the court. The cloak that shadowed the face gaped for a moment as the lamps guttered, and he caught the face. On the edge of silence, he whispered the man’s identity. “What would you ask of me?”

“Did you catch the face of the woman that your sister was speaking with?” The man was a spy master, it was a good question to attempt to answer.

“No.” He gulped, angry at the woman, wishing he had seen her face. “But I need to talk to you. I need to talk to Polyperchon. My family has been up to no good.”

“Why would you turn against your _oikos_?” The speaker asked, knowing he would rarely have reason to think of speaking against his own.

“It endangers the children, this work that they do.” Attacles thought that Europa and Caranus were more important, truly. “The _oikos_ is better served if I speak against them.” And Caranus would never be touched. That would be best. “I have no wish to be dead as well.” Self interest was valid reasoning . Always.


	8. Part Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Farewells, conversations, and shock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This piece of work is not authorized to be posted anywhere outside of An Archive of Our Own.

Alexander let his eyes wander the body of his bride with the knowledge of the days since they were wed, a familiar cleft of chin not taking away the beauty of the body, but instead giving it the hint of imperfection that separated her face from his sister’s. it was a beauty that he had seen too many times over the years to truly lust for, but the marriage was politically feasible to Epirus. Tying his fate to the fate of the Hegemon of Greece thrice over stole nothing from his dignity or his source of power. Cleopatra was young, certainly of an age to breed children for him, and if the herbs they had taken did their job, his heir was already quickening in her belly.

That belly was quivering with rage, the peplos that wrapped around her body not concealing the contractions of her muscles with the thick cloth. He knew the reason, her verbalization of it earlier still rang through his ears. Oh, if one of their line was involved in the attempts on the Hegemon’s life, it wasn’t Olympias, but reasoning with a girl who had not yet gained the full bloom of woman hood was folly. Without a child, they were brainless creatures. 

“My mother wants him dead, and made it happen,” the blond hair was another echo of his sister, her beauty from their Germanic mother having echoed in both son and daughter, if the blond of the areas of year long snow had skipped her. That blond hair which he had held tangled in his fingers was now coiffed into intricacies of heat and pins, and it had shook from side to side as Cleopatra spoke loudly and in anger. “and she makes herself to be a martyr, supporting him at his bedside and accompanying Father out to our taking of leave.” He had silenced her by stealing her breath away and leaving her panting in lust, and another swift attempt to engender a child had left her peplos wrinkled.

Now watching his sister’s son stand at the side of his father, he could remember that scarred face younger. The Hegemon had not yet lost the eye, and they had shared learning together. They had once shared the _blessings_ of Eros, and his lover’s choice of Olympias as the first wife among many had tied them so tightly together, their friendship having been tied into the bindings of marriage. Alexander had thought that the birth of Alexander and Cleopatra had only made them brothers by blood as well.

It had ended in the loss of trade partnerships held by Epirus since Philip had married the sister now known as Olympias, but it had started with his brother by marriage having asked for higher fealty paid. The war against Persia had yet to bleed into the earth or even take their first few satrapies, but more money was needed. Philip’s needs were only for Macedonian troops and Epirate money, the glory held only in Philip’s hands. It had rankled that Epirus, with the same grudge against Persia was left alone when the Macedonians would attack the might of Persia.

The marriage to the niece of one of Philip’s generals was inevitable, they had spoken in the past of the need of the Hegemon not to solely tie himself to his newly conquered lands, but to the lands from which he came. The hostage program that had taught Alexander’s nephew was an example of such ties, but the marriage was perfect to create such ties. Her bloodlines were impeccable.

“It was brilliant to see you again.” His old friend was reclining in the sedan chair. His spies said that the king had managed to walk, but Alexander had yet to see Philip do more than lean forward in the sedan chair, and his nephew was being especially solicitous of the King. That favor surprised him, remembering the younger Alexander’s panicked arrival in Epirus with his mother. Olympias’ residency with him last summer had been nearly the decision that made his new foreign policy. Philip’s announcement of Caranus, the Macedonian girl’s son, as heir was the last stone in the urn to his mental vote.

Epirus’ loyalty to the Hegemony was based in future potential, and as the representative of Epirus, “I had so missed seeing you.” He wanted someone more to the liking of Epirus on the throne of the Hegemon. “Cleopatra is lovely, and I look forward to having grandchildren of your blood.” Alexander the younger was of the same blood, and Caranus wouldn’t survive the war of succession that would follow Philip’s death.

That blasted Athenian crowd mongerer was now finally disagreeing with Attalus’ plan, and hiring a professional to get the job done instead of relying on Attalus’ victim and puppet. That Persian woman’s ideas were correct in getting the job done, according to the man he had who attended those meetings of conspiracy at his behest, but she had attempted to get one of the other conspirator’s to take action. Why had his nephew consorted with that idiot? “ I live in the hope that your health improve.”

“I am quite happy in my improving health,” Phillip was speaking, and it sounded like gravel crunching under the boots of the soldiers that lined the road, an honor guard for his departure under the sun. “and I wish you well at home.” They embraced as much as the chair held on the backs of slaves would let them, and he could see Polyperchon and his investigators watching him. The threat of violence or revolt from Epirus had kept there from being an official search of his quarters here following the failed assassination attempts. The burning of all incriminating evidence, both here and in Epirus made him content in Polyperchon’s continual suspect and lack of access to evidence. Even the King’s information gatherers abroad would be unable to find evidence, only rumors and hearsay. While that was enough to go to war on, it wasn’t enough to endanger them in particular. If Epirus revolted, they would destabilize his brother’s hegemony. It was beautiful. “My wife and your sister would say goodbye.”

Olympias’ eyes were dark as she separated from the gaggle of the king’s wives, stepping forward. In a peplos like her daughter, she stepped through the brisk air of a fall in Macedon and to his side. Her hands were on his shoulders, and Alexander felt his hands go around her waist, the little amount he was allowed to touch within the bounds of propriety. Her lips were brushing his ear and he hoped that their hair, alike in dark color would shade her words from the eyes of the spies.

“Keep my daughter well.” She whispered into his ear. “Make your bed a place of Eros as well as Hera’s domain, and take no pleasure in giving her pain. Should I find that pain was given without cause,” Her fingers were claws in his shoulder, and he remembered the woman who had dared strike the daughter of a Germanic concubine of the King, a legitimate child now, death freezing her face in a caricature of Phobos’ grip. “brother, I will have your heart to dedicate to Dionysus.”

“Sister?” He had her ear at the same junction, her capture of him the same as his ability to connect to her. “I will keep her well. Keep Alexander well? He is the future of us all.” Her eyes were widening as she drew back, nodding in understanding of the meaning of his words. “I will miss seeing you, Olympias.”

“As I will miss thee, Alexander.” She was smiling then, and he wondered at the true amusement in it. “I wish thee children soon.”

“Children?” He could hear the silence setting in on the place of the leave taking. “Sister?”

“I would adore to know that we shared descendants.” He gulped in realization of what she said, the other reading of his marriage of Cleopatra. Her grandchildren would be both his children and his great nieces and nephews, the blood of Achilles twice over. Perhaps they too would be great, as the child of two bloodlines of the gods was already. Alexander’s feet walked on the earth, and he was touched by the gods.

“As would I.” He smiled, reached an arm out to his nephew and pulled the man in tight to his body. “Alexander.”

“Uncle Alexander?” The younger man was discomfited, understanding some of what his mother and uncle had spoken of, but blinded to the nuances. “Treat my sister well? She may not trust my mother, but with Eurydice’s instability, Mother had the best of intentions in arranging that Father think of this marriage.”

“Olympias made this happen?” He had received only the offer, written in the hand of Philip’s secretary Eumenes.

Alexander the younger was smiling as he pulled away, Alexander realized, and disinclined to answer the question. “Enjoy the trip back to Epirus.” The nod to the wagons and horses back behind the party headed to Epirus reminded him that they were waiting. “Oh, and Arrhidaeus would wish you well.”

“Why isn’t your brother here?” That lovely mare that he was planning on riding to Epirus was one of the gifts that the two sons of Philip had gifted him with, a mare gentled at the hands of Arrhidaeus and partially funded by Alexander the younger. As a herd, Alexander could not help but wonder if he had received the culls. They were beautiful beasts, he admitted, but the horses were a full set at twenty, and all were either gelded or mares. Usually with such a gift there would be an appropriate stallion.

“Arrhidaeus was attacked yesterday, while on the road to my new home, until the investigation was complete.” The masculine version of the face of his Germanic mother had taken an unfriendly tilt, jaw hardening and eyes tightening. “He has yet to wake.”

“I see.” He held his hand to wave to Philip, then swung up onto the mare that had stood placidly beside him throughout the conversation. The wagon that held his new wife kept her sheltered from the world, and he anticipated her anger at how she had heard his conversation with his sister already. “May the gods keep you.” Alexander hailed, and the Epirate party moved out, the ambassador accompanying him to his home. Apparently, he’d told Philip, the man’s son was in trouble, and he would be replaced shortly.

“In Athena’s name, why are you questioning me?” That, Polyperchon grimaced was far too much. He didn’t care if the man was the official Athenian ambassador to Philip’s court, he did not need to rub his place as ambassador in on the general. He knew the man was an ambassador without redundant reminders. So much of what this man said irritated him, but it might be a personal issue with the man. He did not like whiners, and found those who indulged them nearly as distasteful. “I am the ambassador, I do not have to deal with this indignity.”

“Wrong.” This particular one of his soldiers was actually gaining Polyperchon’s respect. He had watched some of the early interviews, and was quite willing to learn investigative interrogation. It was quite amusing. “Our agreement with Athens is such that their representatives in Philip’s courts are to be dealt with as regular citizens, without special considerations.”

The ambassador’s chiton rapidly had more color than his face, usually florid with weight and rosibund from what had caused that weight. “Wh-ha-at?” He was stuttering, and Polyperchon was smiling. “Wh—h-hy?”

“It seemed like a smart idea at the time, writing such a clause in the treaties that bind both Athens and Macedon in the eyes of the gods and politics.” Polyperchon had remembered the first time that had been spoken of in courts. Traditionally those sent as messengers or ambassadors had some layer of protection against the displeasure of those in power were they visited, but that had led to problems in the past. After an ambassador of Macedon’s was caught in naughtiness unknown to the King in Thrace, it had been suggested as an idea.

While it left their own representatives without protection, it allowed a greater disavowal of activities and Macedon was no longer obliged to go to war as they had nearly had to after that fiasco in Thrace. Sleeping with three virgins sworn to the city’s gods, the man had gotten caught. Thrace had wanted him dead, and they had needed to create a reason to let him get punished without involving the city. It was resolved with a newly created legality: the priests of the gods were allowed to punish those who had transgressed against the civil religion, and Macedon, without similar legal fiction, had nearly gone to war out of obligation.

“W-wa-wh-hy-ay do—nnn-t I know of this?” The stuttering at last ceased, much to Polyperchon’s happiness. The halting words had grated against his nerves.

“I would presume that you forgot it, or did not finish the paperwork that you received when assuming your position.” Polyperchon thought the question inane, but better the ambassador not know what he knew, that it had most likely been specifically concealed from him. Demosthenes would prefer his puppets not know the treaties that they broke. “Now, a member of the Epirate delegation said that they had seen you in the company of both Leonnatus and Pausanias.”

“Nnot possible.” This man was an idiot. “We always met in private rooms.”

“Oh?”

“Private rooms, and not a member of the Epirate delegation, the ambassador.” The ambassador whom Polyperchon distinctly remembered watching leave with the Epirate delegation. “No one that new… Hades take me.” Polyperchon watched the man realize, the crushing horror obscuring the face, the pallid skin tone retaken by floridity and worse, the blush of embarrassment and anger. “Athena protect me!”

“Oh, do go on.” The soldier asked, and Polyperchon reached for the man’s name as he watched the malice fill his face and stretch the man’s cheeks into a parody of a grin. “You have already damned yourself, you might as well bring the rest of those involved down with you.”

“Can we assume that a certain man in Athens with a large purse and a habit of rabble rousing against your Hegemon Philip of Macedon and our King was involved?”

“I don’t know the name.” But the man was nodding, chins wobbling. “But I had received more funds to attempt to create a more feasible landscape for Athenian politics.”

“Who else were involved in creating a more feasible landscape?” The soldier was parodying the man’s hand gestures, worried sweeps of hands and ill thought words.

“Who else tried to kill the King?”

“Pausanias was supposed to kill the man. One of the men who killed him was to make sure he never talked. Leonnatus was a conspirator, Alexander did not know.” The gasping man was clutching at his heart, unable to touch the ribs through the padding surrounding and protecting it. “This was what the man I bought in this told me. A man with red hair from Thrace.” That was redundant. “Two people of Persia, a man in the embassy. My man gave me his name, Xerxius.”

“Two of Persia?”

“The other was a woman, beautiful, but my man told me no names.” The soldier’s hand left the dagger on his belt, and Polyperchon watched the ambassador heave a sigh of relief. “And another woman, one of Philip’s wives.”

“Which?” Seven wives were seven wives. “Olympias?” By the gods, he hoped not. She was rarely of the mood to kill her husband, and he had thought that if she had ever managed to do it, she would take his life in immediate rage.

“The youngest.” He was gulping. “I wasn’t the only person financing some of this, we had to pay the bodyguard, and Attalus, his niece was there.”

“His niece?” This had to be positive. To accuse the queen?

“My man told me that her chiton was wet in the front, leaking milk. She had a baby boy.”

“Where are we?” Hephaistion watched Attalus’ son and heir with an eye of jaded worry. The man had returned with him to these rooms after he had stormed from his rooms following an argument with his cousin. Upon reclining on the bed, the man had fallen asleep, and Hephaistion had wondered momentarily what Amyntor would think if he returned to the family rooms to find a different man in his son’s bed. Perhaps a full disinheritance would be an option? He had realized it would not be tested when his father roused from his bed without checking his rooms, the reality that Hephaistion did not truly live with his father, only kept rooms and wardrobe here. It was a fiction that worked.

The tapestry upon the wall and the small shrine, only specialized with Aphrodite, not made for her worship fell under the other man’s inquisitive eyes, and Hephaistion was glad he had changed from his earlier garb. Of Persian influence, the pants had been worn in a temple perched in the mountain the site of his visits and dreams since he had left, and sent as a gift from his mother, a token of his childhood. The chiton was more to the general preference of the Hellenistic Macedonians than the pants that he found less revealing, and Attacles would be more inclined to trust it. “We are in my rooms, attached to my father’s rooms in the palace at Aigai.”

“You have your own rooms?” The surprise was drawn with wide brush strokes across the broad face, a friendly face if not particularly handsome, and the man’s opinions on his preferences were left without implication.

“My King does not require my attendance at all times, and all of Alexander’s companions have our own families with rooms at the palace here and the palace in Pella.” Hephaistion merely preferred his place with his King, not his father. “I may not be here much, but these rooms are my own.” Indeed, the shrine to Aphrodite was smoking as a cone of incense burned, his prayers already drifting up to his Lady’s ears on the clouds. “You slept for several hours, the chariot of Helios has already started it’s journey and the Epirate contingent left for Epirus this morning. King Philip saw them off.”

“I see.” He was gulping against the air, muscles thick and twitching against the words that Hephaistion knew the man wanted to say. “Is Arrhidaeus awake?”

“No.” Attacles had pulled his legs up and under his body, his chiton moving and accidentally exposing before he smoothed it down. “Arrhidaeus seems to be better, according to Apollocles.”

“How do you know that?” Attacles was no fool, the tone of his voice said, to believe something without proof. And Hephaistion would never leave a stranger asleep within his rooms while he searched out his missing answers. “What proof?”

“Apollocles is of a temple of Apollo, he is merely attached to the court for a time.” Hephaistion kept his voice calm and his eyes on the son of Attalus,’ hoping that the man would calm and speak. “I am the only child of a head priestess of Aphrodite. One of his men brought me a bit of their last shipments of incense this morning.” A nod of his head to the shrine scenting the room as proof. “He related to me all appropriate news. The king is also improving in strength, Pausanias’ attack is much less than what it was.”

“What do you want of me?” At last, a truly self interested question. Self interest and selfishness were two separate things, and if a man did not think of his own interest, what interest did they have in the pursuit of their own life, let alone a mutual goal? “Hephaistion, what would you have of me?”

“What do you know of the conspiracy to kill the king?” He knew the man knew more than he said, and the man had a good reason to speak of it. “Is there anything that you need to confess in another?” Arrhidaeus had once asked of Aphrodite’s messages on the support of other’s whose gifts of Aphrodite were badly used, and he had few friends. What Nessa had taught him was that there were differences between the violation of the body and the gifts of Aphrodite, one a thing of violence at times Ares’ _gifts_ , the other a thing of desire or love. “ Was the injury to my King’s brother a part of that?”

“Eurydice.” Hephaistion moved to sit as he had been taught to in the sanctuary of the temple, to lean forward to induce learning and show respect. “But it started with Pausanias. Father invited him to a party with his friends, and Father’s wrong. Pausanias was young enough that Father had his pleasure of him with ease.” A scuffed cough and more shaking shoulders. “Father likes them young, and wanted Pausanias. He also knew that what he could do with that rape was create what happened. He, Father, no Attalus,” Hephaistion watched the other man, the older man, correct his words. “knew that Pausanias loved the King not just as a teacher of the things of friendship, but as a lover. He implied that the King, perhaps even stated outright that the King had allowed, nay, encouraged Father to his work. That the violence that he was taken with was the way the King told Father that he wished it. That the rape was unknowing on Attalus’ side.”

“You do not believe that?” He watched the teary eyes catch his, reddening with anger and embarrassment as the nose inflated.

“Father likes them young. He likes to rape, take them without permission. The squirming and fighting turns him on.” He was shaking again, and Hephaistion reached out, pulling the man against him until he could breathe calmly. “He started when I was barely eight. He’s never touched a female like that, but Father does not think women are able to think that way. He wants the submission, the taking, and women are always taken.”

He had heard that before, and Hephaistion rarely understood that line of thought. He was the son of a woman who had taken men as consorts for Aphrodite, for the pleasures of Aphrodite, and this subjugation of power and gender did not make sense to him. Rather, it made sense, but seemed wrong to him, even as he subscribed to it and was its victim.

“What else do you know of this?” The support was in his hands still holding the hands of the other man. Perhaps his status as the catamite of Alexander would keep the man accepting of his support instead of rejecting any support of his admission, of the problems that Attacles had with the thefts from Aphrodite’s gifts.

“Attalus was not the only person. Eurydice was involved, Leonnatus. Other men, one was Persian. One other woman, also Persian, but I couldn’t see her face. She was speaking with Eurydice before she left the apartment, goading my cousin onwards.” A pause, clenching fingers and a resuming and reclamation of his own sense of dignity was starting in Attacles’ eyes. “Did you see her face?”

“No.” Hephaistion had only heard the voice in parts and snippets, not enough to make an identification of the woman. His need for concealment to allow eavesdropping had meant that he had sacrificed some audibility and visibility to safety. “I wish that I had, but I had not. You were saying things about a doom on your family?”

“Caranus is barely a year old.” His eyes were dark, and the grip on Hephaistion’s hands, Hephaistion could feel the fingers clenching on his bones and squeezing the flesh, mashing against his joints. “Seven more years and Father could hurt him. Europa is four, and Father might not like her as he would like a boy child, but if he wanted to take her as _epiklerate_ for the throne should both the King and Caranus die, he could take her at eleven.” Hephaistion’s harsh gasp for air surprised himself. He had become his King’s at age twelve, and while he had not regretted that, it was his choice. “Eurydice is an idiot, a puppet. She does things that Father, Attalus tells her to, even if they would get her killed.”

“You think it will get her killed.” Hephaistion knew that wars of succession, especially in Macedon, were by nature bloody. Not just the girl would or could die.

“I know that it would get some one killed. I am expendable as well.” He was grimacing. “I would think that former Queen Olympias would kill both my cousin and her son, or try to in the event of her husband’s death.” A pause for breath as he collected his thoughts. “Also, traitors die. It does not mean just the traitor, it means the traitor’s family. Attalus, Eurydice, myself, Europa, and Caranus. Though probably not Caranus.”

“I agree.” Hephaistion did, and thought that he would also be involved in such an attempt. “And if Attalus is as involved in this as you are saying, he would also try to kill Alexander or Arrhidaeus.”

“He has already tried.” The sharpened practice sword.

“Do you have proof?” It was an essential question. Without it, this would be hearsay. Polyperchon would listen, and it might affirm what he was worried of, but it was not everything.

“When I stated that my cousin was an idiot, I meant it.”

“What do you mean?” Hephaistion was left on the bed as Attacles’ pushed his body up and stalked across the room, going from side to side and back, before kneeling before the altar, whispering words for a moment before rising again to walk back to the bed. “Attacles, what did you mean by that?”

“My cousin kept them.” Kept ‘them’? Kept what, the attempts, reports, what? “Eurydice kept my father’s communications to his people here in the city, in the conspiracy.”

“Proof of his involvement.”

“And her involvement. The involvement of other men in the conspiracy. The outlines of their plans.” Hephaistion could feel triumph in the pit of his stomach. This was perfect for proof. Written in Attalus’ hands, it would exonerate Attacles, exonerate Alexander. It would perhaps clear the way for Alexander to ascend the throne in the future.

“Polyperchon!” The shout as he left the Athenian ambassador in the interrogation room caught his attention, his eyes flying down the stone hallway to a shadowy figure with a familiar voice. The other spy master in Philip’s court, some what his rival with the man’s attachment to Philip’s oldest legitimate son.

“Hephaistion?” He made steps towards the man, and could feel a soldier shadowing his steps. The soldier that had accompanied him in his interrogation of the ambassador still with the man, and this one having guarded the door and now abandoning it. “Who is with you?”

“Polyperchon, formerly of Epirus, may I introduce you to Attacles, son and heir of Attalus. He has information that may confirm some of the information that you have learned in your investigation.”

“Hephaistion!” The barked name did the opposite of cowing the man, instead causing him to laugh in amusement. “What did you hear?”

“That you had found a large amount of money in one of the Athenian embassy’s men’s things, money that he was storing for the ambassador, earmarked for the assassin that would kill King Philip at Demosthenes’ discretion.” To counter the accusing glare, he answered it with a smile and part of a confession. “The man roomed with a devotee of Poseidon, who was curious as to his roommate’s lack of return to the room. He asked several very specific questions and placed the pieces in order.”

“How did you hear of it, then?” Hephaistion’s answer to his curiosity was a happy spurning laugh, and he gave that up, instead thinking to ask his man in service to the shrine if he had heard of any of it. The other man, however, kept his own counsel well, and kept it quietly. “What news have you, you both, then?” His eyes swept over Attacles’ garb. The cloak was clearly borrowed from Hephaistion, thrown on hastily and a bit short, barely covering half the calf, and obscuring what looked to be sleep wrinkled clothes underneath it.

“Attacles here had best say it.” The look on his adversary’s face was of worry, and that he let the other man speak probably meant that he did not trust that Polyperchon would believe it if it came from his lips first.”

“My cousin, Eurydice, has hosted several men and a woman in her rooms. Twice to my knowledge since the first attack on King Philip.” Attacles’ swallowed, swallowing away nerves, presumably. “They spoke of conspiracy to kill King Philip, and that Pausanias and Leonnatus both were theirs.”

“Why come to me now?” Polyperchon realized the timelines and the problems in it. “You have waited several days for this, in the least.”

“I do not care of this.” He watched the man, older than Hephaistion but far younger than him. Selfishness was healthy. “I maintain general neutrality, but I am friends with Arrhidaeus.”

“He was attacked yesterday.” The man was nodding, and that had to be it.

“I had considered many possible reasons for my involvement.” Attacles was reaching for words. “I adore my niece and nephew, and they are enjoyable. But what I heard of the conspiracy could get all of us killed. I thought the conspiracy unified enough that there would be no likelihood of the whole of us, of our family, being implicated.”

“ But something changed.”

“Arrhidaeus was no threat to them, but one of them ordered him attacked, without speaking with the rest.” He watched the man confirm with twisting hands. “There are other dangers in assassination, but that made me need to come forward.”

“What proof do you have?”

“Letters, sir. Letters.” A bitten lip. “She hid them in the nursery in our apartments, endangering the children from her cohorts should they learn of this. And the letters, they implicate my father as well. Or rather, they are his instructions in this.”

Attalus was involved against Philip, certainly now.

“I need to see the letters.” They were walking down the hall together now, instead of standing still. “I need to see them now.” Hephaistion paused, and Polyperchon noticed. “Why are you willing to speak against your father?”

“The letters will inform you of what you need to know.” Attacles did not want to voice the words, Polyperchon thought, and wondered at the reason before heading towards proof.


	9. Part Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A murder attempt, or permission to return to bedsport. Possibly both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story does not have permission to be posted anywhere except An Archive of Our Own.

The wife that he had summoned to his rooms following his daughter and brother’s abandonment of Aigai was the wife who had not attended. His Eurydice had been with her only son, his darling Caranus, and her breasts had been lax as she’d come to him.

Standing in front of him, she was dressed in a chiton of the thinnest fabric, the color an ecru that was lighter than her skin, the tan that she had inherited from her mother, a true woman of Macedon, of his kin vaguely. He could see the furring of her mound, different to the sparsity of hair that had been there when he had first taken her to bed so long ago. She was still pretty, but that blush of innocence was replaced with the rouged nipples. She still was lovely, Eurydice was, but his next wife born of Macedon…Ha, what was he thinking. Attalus would not be pleased if he put his niece aside, and she had born him two solid children.

“Come to my bed.” It was an order, and in the full light of the dimming sun streaming through the windows and into his bed chamber, Eurydice crossed the room. Small drops of liquid from her unbound breasts soaked into the fabric, staining the color a shade of yellow that he was familiar with. The liquid certainly outlined the swell of her breasts, rapidly refilling following his son’s dinner. The wet nurse that supplemented Eurydice was feeding a hungry child while he was hungry for his wife.

Eurydice was standing next to the bed now, and he had his legs dangling over the side. The tightness in his ribs, the doctor had warned him, was not to be stretched out, or stretched again, and even in repose he could feel it knotting under his skin as the blood in his system started to move. His lust had been stoppered like wine within the flask, awaiting dinner and watering. He had taken Meda roughly the morning of the wedding, and had Eurydice right before he had left for the theatre, but it had just been this morning in the presence of his son that he had received permission to loose himself on the loins of another.

One hand went to her wrist, pulling her forward and into his lap, ruffling and gathering the skirts of her chiton as her legs spread to catch her weight against him, the roundness of her bottom rubbing and grating against his thighs on the way to sitting upon his groin. Pale thigh was exposed as he moved his hands along the exposed leg, gripping one leg hard enough to indent the leg. It was moved to the reverse of his hip, leaving her spread open underneath the filmy garb that she had come to him in.

“Interesting outfit.” He heard his voice, gruff in the air of the room as he moved his head forward to the crook of her neck where it met with her shoulder, pressing his mouth against the flesh there. The skin tasted of the olives, her body rubbed in the oil to make the skin retain its supple nature even through the harsh reality of childbirth and nursing. “Were you wearing it when I called for you?” His cock was rising against her bottom, and Eurydice rubbed against it, familiar with this game.

“Yes, yes I was.” Actually, she was wearing it in anticipation of his call, having been informed as all the wives had that he would be able to take someone to bed today. His lust for bedroom games meant that at least one wife, maybe more would be called to his bedchambers, and perhaps that youth that he had taken in. Hippocles was becoming more adept, to what her maid had heard. “What are you wearing in your _khiton_?”

Philip could feel the smile on his lips as she took to his game, and pressed his hips forward to distinctly press against her, hearing her affected squeal before he answered her. “What I’m wearing would like to meet what you’re wearing beneath your chiton.” With that, his hands moved to her shoulder and the pins that held the chiton in place, letting it pool around his hips, leaving her chest bare to the air as he tossed the pins, hearing them crash against the floor as he pressed forward. Running his chin against her chest, he could feel the breath in her fragile chest as his beard brushed against the skin and captured a breast in his hand, embracing the nipple with fingers and an exploratory tongue.

“May I?” Her fingers were on his arms, gripping like an armlet around his biceps. His teeth pulled a gasp from her, and the ministrations changed sides as he manipulated the pull of her muscles and nerves in reaction to him. In his lap, he could feel the encroachment of her dampness on his chiton as it pooled through, and his own erection only strengthened, liquid sliding down to pool on his sac. “May I?” Her lips were on his shoulder, pressing him backwards and his hands on her chest slid down to her waist, tearing the delicate fabric of her chiton as they moved, gripping against her.

Nude now, she sat on his chest, removing his chiton with deft fingers on the pins, rolling them across the bed as she prowled over him. So young, and in the growing twilight her hips did not show the stretch that the birth of his daughter and then his son had forced through her body. Instead, he saw her body writhing on him, painting his slight paunch with her wetness and soaking the hair that sprouted from his collarbone to his thighs with her desire as she tempted against him.

Back and forth she moved, teasing with her cunt against his cock, avoiding the embrace of it as her hands played with his chest and shoulders. Back and forth, and back and forth as he longed to be in her, and he thrust upwards, trying to force his cock into a hole that was now rocking against his pectorals, another thrust that avoided her but briefly, glancing off of the second way with a verbal yelp from the girl.

Instead he moved his arms from their quiescent position against his body to her hips, pulling her flush onto his hips. “Eurydice,” Philip moaned, a hand going between them to ensure that the path his cock took was correct, “Eurydice.” and he slammed through the hole that his forefinger and thumb had cleared, stabbing into the wetness with a solid thrust.

A grunt of surprise came from her throat as his cock pressed erect into her, and he moved his hands to her hips, pulling her up and down as he moved only slightly. It did not pull as badly as he had thought it might, and it was one of the forms that Apollocles had recommended him to take for sex and the ease in this. With his cock leaking, he felt their slipperiness increase as the heat of passion and interlocked bodies in the dying heat of the day, and he kept thrusting up. Up, up, up, and she was moving her hips against him and moaning. One of his hands moved under her joining with his body, and he could feel her pitch forwards as he rubbed against the fleshly gift from Aphrodite to women, a physical sign that they lacked what could make them man, or rather, their male parts in minutiae, and he rubbed against it.

It was engorged, and she was shrieking, which irritated his ears but made her pulse around him as her little cock was pet, and her nails were raking into his shoulder as she supported her body as he thrust into her and played with her.

Another shriek came with the thumb he placed against her, pushing her into a scream of contentment as she started to push around him, her channel moving as he pushed her to the heights of pleasure. Philip knew that the push of her against his cock would start his cock along.

White filled the sides of his eyes and he moved his hands to her hips, making sure the cunt stayed in place as he hammered into it. The white at the sides of his vision moved to stars across his vision, and instead of a woman wet with sweat and filled with the flush of intercourse, breasts bouncing as he pounded, her back arched and her mouth open, he saw the skies, Athena beside him pushing Pausanias, the woman atop him smiling at Pausanias’ approach, that smile, that smile against him flashing down upon him as she rode him, her mouth smiling with hedonistic pleasures now as she moaned.

“Gods!” He was groaning, and the stars were eclipsed with the black of the night as the night, and there were words in his head as his orgasm poured through him and his seed poured out. Her smile was gnawing down at him, and those words, Athena’s voice in his mind. _Stop!_ And it was coiled in his belly, exploding through his arms, and Athena was there, a virgin goddess in a bed of lust as that pleasure raged through him. _Stop and remember!_

The world was color again, and Philip could feel himself letting go of Eurydice’s hips, pulling them both to the side as the force of sex left them, falling against their clothes mixed with the bedclothes. The lust was momentarily satiated, and he could feel the hammering of his heart in his chest subsiding even as the stretch he felt was realized to be his side. A lazy hand checked, and the injury that had been sewn shut with a deft hand by his errant priest of Apollo was not bleeding, only tender, and the pleasure instead moved him to smile at her, his eyes meeting the brown of hers, unable to read hers. She was no Olympias, filled with the songs of the Gods, or Meda with her knowledge of life and her dancing wit. She was something, something, something that he should stop and think of, but he could feel Morpheus tugging on his mind, and Helios had parked his chariot for the night, so a nap would not be out of the question.

As her husband’s eyes slowly drooped shut, and the hard flesh of his lust softened, pulling out of her as her husband rolled away into a flattened body of sleep, Eurydice’s eyes lit on the chitons pooled together on the bed. They were swiftly rolled, and she moved her body, kneeling over him.

 _He couldn’t breathe!_ That was what woke him, struggling, brown eyes staring into him as her knees pinned his shoulders and he pushed, pulling, forcing himself up even as the wound in his side beat him back and down into the bed.

Her eyes were tight above him, and he could feel the rough fabric of whatever she was forcing against his mouth pushing inwards, his teeth mashing, and he was cursing sending the guards to the outer doors while he _enjoyed_ his wife, and he couldn’t breathe! Trying to push backwards earned him a harsh jab in the wound in his side, a glancing blow from a foot he had once embraced with his mouth.

He could feel it, feel Thanatos with his hands on his soul as the breath of his life was kept in his body, and the breath surrounding his body kept from him. As his eyes started to cloud, he felt as if Hades were his next destination, and he did it, _remembering_. Her smile was one he had seen before, that triumphant look on her face as Pausanias had moved towards him before Athena had shown her hand. She had known, Eurydice had known what Pausanias had meant to do.

As his eyes moved to black, he felt the cloth against him relax, and her body collapse over him as he regained breath. Eurydice’s body was pushed to the side, slender hands and a rounded face moving her body, rolling her so that the blade that pierced her body pierced her straight through and pushed through the rest of her body. Blood was spilt upon the bed, and Meda was kneeling next to him, helping him sit up and making sure that he was breathing at the same time.

Eurydice was moaning, and Philip could hear her again, the world pulling into clarity he realized.

“GUARDS!” Meda was shouting. “GUARDS!” It was the sound of pounding feet, not just soldiers, and Polyperchon was there suddenly, pulling Eurydice out of the bed and pushing her into the arms of the soldiers.

“Take her into custody.”

“She really left them in the nursery.” His disbelief and distaste about the skills of Eurydice were written across the words leaving his mouth, having opened the box and finding the letters inside. Now they were spread across the bed in the room, Attacles having ushered his aide Dymenes and their wetnurse out of the room. Thankfully, Attacles had murmured, his cousin’s nurse seemed to have disappeared, and Polyperchon was aware of what he meant. The woman would be and was only loyal to her mistress, something that would be problematic in this kind of nasty business. “While I may admit that this would not be the first place searched, I would not ignore it, and I certainly would be less than happy about finding such things.” He interrupted himself. “ No. I would be pissed off. Plain angry, maybe even violently so. By placing such things in here, she made potential targets of two children of my Liege, potentially could have caused one of his heirs to be killed.”

They were parchment rather than the reed paper that came out of Egypt, and that itself indicated money spent. Parchment was the skin of animals, and made more thin than the leather that it was customarily found in. There was scraping, and soaking, and stretching. Polyperchon thought there might even be a repetition of that process. He had some around for personal use, but he preferred the reusable clay tablets for daily use, and only let the professionals use parchment. He would rather not have to spend massive amounts of money on something extravagant.

Attalus, however, was often centered around extravagant shows of money especially in things that he did not need to spend money on. His niece was an example. She did none of her own weaving, spending money on cloth imported from the far reaches of Philip’s influence for _daily_ wear. Her daily wear was not even practical, and she had layered in warmth to avoid the cold, layers of cloth that a good peplos in fabric woven of the wool of the mountain sheep could have dismissed the need for. Expensive gauze might entice, but sensibility and practicality, Attalus did not always realize. He was rather more impressed with power, and the pursuit of it. His marriage of his niece to the king, having first introduced the woman to the king’s bed to ensure proof of fertility was a Macedonian coup of power through marriage. It was the first woman currently living of Macedonian blood married to the king, and it gave Attalus power over Philip and Philip’s court.

“You’re sure this is everything?”

“I can not go to my father’s rooms.” Attacles answered the soldier, his eyes on Polyperchon’s hands holding the letters. “So I did not search them. I searched my cousin’s rooms while she was at the King’s bedside, but my father’s rooms, I did not review.” The soldier had questioning eyes. “My position as my father’s heir lasts only as long as I live.” He had felt the blood trying to leave his body once, and he hadn’t liked the experience, and certainly wouldn’t like to try it again. Father’s lesson, pounded onto his back and into his body, blowing through his nerves had made his mind set in this. “Father, father, how do I say this?”

“Attalus has issues regarding his personal possessions.” Hephaistion had twisted the words to rescue Attacles from the question, to avoid the whole of the possible implications of the sentence. “Attacles is correct in his assumptions.”

“You would speak against a lord?” Polyperchon thought that ill advised of the other man, who made a living from the avoidance of absolutes and created realities for his Prince to decide on based on the information he had gathered.

“I would speak against the man who took a youth against his will.” Hephaistion’s eyes were dark. “I knew that of the man before Pausanias even thought of knives.” Knowledge, knowledge was in his eyes, Polyperchon realized. Hephaistion had spent time at the mercy of the court following his Prince’s self exile from the court. “Before all things that I have learned, I learned two things of my Goddess. First, that love in the myriad forms are the blessings given to us by the Gods, also gifted to the gods as blessings by the Mother our Earth.” Hephaistion knew these words. “I also learned that the gods may demand sacrifices, but they are never sacrifices we are unwilling to give. Sex without consent is not sacrifice, such things are blasphemy, a theft of the blessings.”

“I had forgotten that you were born to a temple of Aphrodite.” He had heard those words in multiple forms, but rape as blasphemy was born in the temples of Aphrodite, her sexuality and sensuality her own, not something to be infringed upon by another. Those who were victims of such thefts­­­­­ were sheltered within the walls of Aphrodite, and she had once or twice called her vengeance against transgressers. “You have something else.” He watched the other man, chin jutting out as he shook his head, silence locked behind slightly rounded lips, color fading as time distanced him. “I’ll read the letters.”

He watched his informant wince, pulling himself together even as threads unraveled, eyes darting to the door, and gulped before speaking. “I would assist my assistant with the children.” Dymenes, that was the name that had been thrown away of Attacles’ personal helper in the maintenance of the estate. “If you would have me watched, one of the soldiers could come with me.” There was already a soldier posted with the son of the King and his sister, a bright girl with smiles bouncing off of the walls as her peplos matched her mother’s cousin in sparsity of tone and color but quality of cloth. Warm to fit the weather as it chilled with the approach of winter.

“The soldier in the main room can watch you as well.” Polyperchon waved the man off, eyes on the letters as the man went out the door. “Hephaistion, what did you know of this?”

“I knew that there was increased communication from the Persian front and here, that the Persian agents that I was familiar with were not in the same places as before.” His comrades­ were no longer the same, that had been odd, but Hephaistion had probably, Polyperchon knew, placed it the same way he had. The impending advance into Persia was creating pressure within Persia, and the recall of agents in the court to report to command was not surprising. They were doing the same things from Persia. “Demosthenes had sent a large sum of money, or rather, his financial man sent a large amount of money to the man here at their embassy, but his assassin had managed to get himself killed while trying to take a boat here.”

That, he hadn’t known. Interesting information though. The letters now, they were certainly words to read.

“And I quote,” the words visibly got his compatriot’s attention. “ _While my attempt to turn the son of the orgiastic whore’s creature against him failed, the same techniques worked on the current King’s play toy. The boy turned against him, and that is how, Lady Spy, I found our conspiracy a puppet to use against the King. Philip will die at the hands of the boy I convinced him not to allow justice for, justice against myself._ Interesting wording, no?”

“He wanted either a man of Alexander’s who if caught,” They were both analyzing this, and Hephaistion would word this better as the person only listening and not reading, across the room, hand resting on the cradle. “would implicate Alexander. Or a man who would turn against Alexander as well. Leonnatus would be the first, but not necessarily the second.”

“What he did to you during the exile,” but Hephaistion was shaking his head, unwilling to speak on it, and Polyperchon read another quote. “He writes; _Our plan to kill the king of Macedon perfects our position, Cleopatra,”_ This was from another letter, addressed to his niece under her name gifted of her parents. “ _and your birth of Caranus was most fortuitous. Now we must remember not to become overly self confident, as even when the King your husband is dead, we have no sure guarantee of the throne. The whore’s son is acknowledged as his son, and legitimate, named as a heir if not the heir. The dancer’s son is acknowledged as son as well, and Philip’s by blows litter the kingdom. There are even cousins with a legitimate claim, but Alexander is the most dangerous one. I will make sure that he or his mother are implicated in actions against us to spare us undue attention,_ ” He would have went on, but the man at the cradle pushed it back, and it creaked as it swung. “Oh, this is an indulgence in ego.”

“Attalus needed the secret kept, so he told Eurydice, but he needed to reassure himself that his plans were brilliant.” Snappy comeback, and correct from the tones of that letter. “Are there any others with things of interest? Names that haven’t come out of Athenian mouths?”

“How did you know?” The protest had not separated from Polyperchon’s lips before he breathed a negation of them. “Never mind. It is our jobs to know things, no?” He flipped to another letter. “Where did you say that the idiot woman was, Hephaistion?” Polyperchon dove into the next words. “ _We would not want the King to survive, and should all others fail, I wish you to insure that the death comes to pass. As his wife, he may call you to his bed and fall asleep. Such injuries as assassinations even failed might bring the hands of Thanatos to a man as elderly as I or Philip.”_ Hephaistion’s eyes were wide, he noticed, but the gulped words were spoken over as Polyperchon continued his quoting of words that damned the woman and her uncle. “ _Keep breath from his throat and then call for the guards when he is dead, say that you woke from the lack of snoring. Get the job done, and claim the throne in Caranus’ name in his bedchambers next to his corpse.”_ A sharp breath. “I knew he was a piece of work, but”

“Polyperchon!” The shout and the mumbled words that Hephaistion had tried to say earlier were verbalized, the soldier hearing them as he spoke them loud, louder than the quoting. “Dymenes said that Eurydice was summoned to the king’s bed.”

“THAT, Hades take her.” Polyperchon was standing, scooping the letters together and stuffing them into the bag at his side even as the soldiers left running for the King’s chambers. “There.”

The hallways seemed longer to Polyperchon as he ran, the breath rushing from his lungs as he was thankful for his maintenance of his body’s flexibility and stamina. The king’s life depended on this, perhaps. Stones passed by, and startled faces as he went, some of the soldiers joining in as they passed by, Hephaistion at his elbow as they ran.

There, that lintel, that door, and standing just inside, Olympias at the door with the guards, her eyes wide, and he could hear sobbing from the inner chambers. Thinking it too late, he stepped forward, running forward. “Arrest Eurydice!”

“Too late.” His beloved’s voice had an ironic tone that he had heard from her before, speaking of her husband. She was wearing a peplos wrinkled with sleep, and he could see the crease of her face against the covers across her cheek. The Epirate accent in her voice had diminished over time, as had his, but it was familiar, and always lifted his thoughts even in these dark times. If the king was dead, perhaps, but the arrest of the king’s killer must come first. She was smiling, her face wreathed in some relief and some regret, even as Olympias spoke again, damning some of his wishes and saving others. “Meda stabbed her, straight through with a peplos’ pin.” He could see her own, the pipes of Dionysus on the head, the length certainly able to kill if kept sharp. “Philip’s alive.”

The air seemed to push into Polyperchon’s lungs, pushing out hope and pulling in the hints of despair before he stopped and realized the whole of it. His king was alive, but he could not touch her still.

Prayers and Dionysus’ blessings were not always the same thing, and at times, Olympias missed the days of her youth when her full enjoyment of the blessings of the Wandering God were not always curtailed by her duties to Hera and husband.

She had prayed in the shrines and at the roadside, the altars of her youth replaced with the altars of Macedon, the altars and the priests that followed her husband’s camps of war and the towns themselves.

Standing in the room of her husband, Olympias could only wonder at what she had forgotten in her changing place in the eyes of the gods.

The dream had changed. Usually Meda dreamed of the horses of her home, the herds that her father had kept and the mare who had been a gift to her upon her seventh birthday. Hippos, because she had been a very smart girl who had professed loudly that a horse needed only to be spoken to with kindness and a tone be given in the voice when the name is spoken every time that name was spoken. She had been on Hippos, and one of her brothers was laughing, she was sitting against his chest as he had urged Hippos faster, racing through the plains.

The plains had gone from the shining bronze of the fall of the sun reflecting from the grass to a purple sky streaked with red, and the wind whistling from the west singing in greeting. Red looked almost to drip from the skies, blood falling on her nose as she stood in a field, listening to the thunder as two armies stood against each other. The rain made the grasses beneath her feet turn to a mud of blood drenching the soil as feet churned it, pounding against the ground and turning it to pulp as swords clashed.

The sea beneath her crashed against the rocks, the cliffs bleached white with sun and the ground craggy with the growth of hardy weeds beneath her. This was a place of mountains and water, and a temple was perched above the water, facing another temple as if she was the mirror in which they reflected. One masculine, one feminine, the statues welcoming in worshippers with open hands and braziers of smoke that shimmered beneath her nose, the blue of the sea dyed red, red, red as she fell forward and was born again in fire.

Fire, flame, all around her, and she could feel it against her skin. Beneath her the things of marriage, a name on her lips as tears steamed. Her fat melted as she screamed, smoke choking the vocalization of pain and death in Meda’s throat, her wrists burning as the bracelets she wore liquefied, shining with the light of the forge as the flame engulfed.

The glowing metal became a set of glowing hands, wrapped around her wrists and eyes stared into hers as a form built around her, in front of Meda. _Meda_. It was a whisper, this form of fire and forge, a breath of cold air into the inferno. _Meda!_ It was a shout, echoed through her mind and screaming into her ears as the fire hissed. The hands pulled on her wrists.

She was standing again, a woman in front of her dressed in the peplos of winter and the _polos_ on her head, a staff in her hands as eyes regarded each other. The room filled with clouds, and it was indeed a room for all it was the blue of skies and felt as if it had no ending, for the woman in front of her had her hand on a wall and it rested upon a boundary in mid air. In this place, the woman’s mouth smiled, and Meda heard it. _Meda, consort of Philip_. The titular place in her reality. _Meda, you see much that is, and much that would be, should Philip die now._

She had stood on the plain with the scent that had come to her each time Eileithyia and Athena had failed her in the birth of a healthy child, the stink that had filled her nostrils when her grandfather had died, and there was dread, cold upon her neck and shivering in recognition of what could be to come. _Philip is not much beloved of me, a man who has taken seven wives and honors none of them to the whole of their gift to him._ It would be Hera who said that, Hera as a face of the feminine power, a Hera whose worship was from the wives and her gifts to them, and through them to their husbands. It was no wise man, Meda’s grandmother had said, who ignored what the women of his household said to him, and her grandfather, a loud man with a booming laugh whose fall from his horse was his last ride and last fall both, had agreed with her, smiling. They had shared a marriage of caring and amusement. Hera’s gifts and Aphrodite’s gifts were not the same, one of a familial passion and the other a lustful one, though they did conflict. _Aphrodite has no love for Philip either, though her words to Zeus swayed him to our opinions in this. Meda, save Philip on this night, from a sister of ours still in heart dedicated to Artemis as child, for all she sacrificed her toys on her altar and her virginity in my bed._ Eurydice, then. Olympias, Olympias. _Olympias had none of this, for all she holds neither my gifts nor Aphrodite’s for Philip anymore._ Quiet words of a goddess who kept herself in stately elegance, eyes seeing Meda’s mind, and eyes of gentle kindness turned to quick rage. _Awake, Meda! Awake and find the safety of your husband!_

Her bed was sprawled with blankets and she was still partially rolled within her peplos, pulling her body out of alighnment. One thigh was pressed into the bed, but her calf and foot dangled off, and her eyes were on her bed chambers. The peplos was swift to untangle, stumbling from the bed to wrap herself, grab the pins from their place on a table. Lengths of sharpened metal, they were what she garbed herself in daily, her mind always rememberering the stories of women who had stabbed their kidnappers to death with these. Instead, the horse tipped pins had been a gift from her mother upon her marriage and move to a more Grecian court, a reminder of what duties she had to her husband and herself.

Five doors down, three corridors over, and her bedroom was just behind her as she shouted, awakening her staff. “I must get to the King!” It was a shout. “In the name of Hera, we must get there, and she could hear the household rousing as she moved, running.

Half asleep, she was risen from dreams, and that was what Meda knew as she stood in the doorway of her husband’s bedchamber, and saw them struggle. It was when she saw Philip’s face, air pouring in his lungs that she looked over at her former fellow wife, eyes wide as she lay against the stone floor, pushed from the bed.

Blood was pooling under Eurydice’s mouth, congealing even as Olympias stepped over her body, the breath railing out of her chest as neither woman made any attempt to help her. “You came to the aid of the king?”

There was no reply from Olympias even as the other woman watched her husband, and Meda was unsure if she expected it. Then they were not alone with their husband, the guards arriving and Polyperchon there, Amyntor’s son on his heels with a face drawn tight with worry.

“Arrest Eurydice!” It was shallow now, words that did not have any meaning, words that did not apply, and those were the words from the general’s mouth, and at last Olympias spoke, Philip’s head cradled in Meda’s lap even as her peplos bared a breast.

“Too late.” Philip was sitting up, his eyes following the conversation. “Meda stabbed her, straight through with a peplos’ pin.” Polyperchon was gasping again, and Meda wondered at memories of Hera invoked by him now. “Philip’s alive.”

It rang through the air with the clash of swords, spears rattling and the pipes playing of happiness. It was as if she could hear Hera again for a moment. _On his life._ But it was a whisper, and she heard other words far more sweet to Meda’s ears.

“What happened?” The strong voice was raspy, dried by the cloth pressed to it. “Meda? Polyperchon?”


	10. Part Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aftermaths

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This piece of work only has permission to be posted on An Archive of Our Own.

“My cousin is dead.” It was not a surprise to Polyperchon or Hephaistion the way that Attacles spoke the words, one man who only by blood belonged in the room. Eurydice’s body had been removed from the premises, and Polyperchon had taken over the results of that culmination of the investigation. Three assassination attempts on one king within a month, this was not the optimal reality for anyone in the area. His choice to double the guard following his review of the letters seemed to be vindicated in the attack that had happened in the short time that he had discovered the conspiracy and the ability to follow through with his decision. “My cousin is dead, and what am I?” Attacles’ was asking. “Am I a traitor due to my family’s traitorous duties? A betrayer of my own kin in turning her in?”

“What of a protector of your kin?” It was the other person whose business in the king’s bedchamber was similar only to Polyperchon’s reasons, his position and collection of various scraps of intelligence. “The young prince might have ended up on the wrong end of another’s ambitions for the throne if your cousin had succeeded in her attempt on King Philip’s life.”

“Or even as an accidental casualty.” Olympias drawled, eyes like flint. She was in agreement with Hephaistion on this, Caranus would be unlikely to survive an ensuing war of succession following her husband’s timely and violent death. It was not that he was truly a threat to her Alexander, but rather that he was a threat in his symbolism. Attalus was the true threat, and perhaps she and her Lanike should look into that. “Oh.”

Philip drew away from Meda’s hovering hands that pampered him, eyes flickering to one of the canniest of his wives. When Olympias used that tone of voice, he had always sat still and listened. Women were not the most stable of creatures, but as Olympias’ brother Alexander had once told him, she was akin to a man captured within the form of a woman, trapped by the rounded breasts and inverted sex of a woman’s body.

The first time he had heard her use that tone of voice, he had not realized that she was plotting, instead thinking that she was curious about something. Within ten turns of the moon, his eldest live, legitimate daughter was born. It had set the stage for a great deal else, including Olympias’ petition of the gods for a son, and his own echo to Zeus for a similar blessing. A son, he’d asked for, and he never remembered that night after his prayers, even if he remembered vaguely even the most drunk of nights. No, Olympias’ voice of interest was a dangerous voice. “Oh?”

“I had heard that a snake had been used or attempted to be used against young Caranus.” She had a voice that sounded as if she had swallowed her voice again, unable to tell all things that she knew to another. “I am missing no snakes, and have not set a snake against the blood of my husband.”

Careful, careful words, Hephaistion smiled at those. This meant only that Caranus and other blood of her husband were safe, not he, nor Meda, and Eurydice had not been safe from Olympias’ snakes. This did not mean that she had not plotted or attempted, and from the set of Philip’s face and Polyperchon’s drawn back mouth they also realized what she meant when she said that. Meda nodded, but some of those in the room did not.

Antipater also stood there, a new arrival who had been fetched by the same soldier who had pulled Attacles to the scene, and his cloak still smelled of the smoke of prayers to Apollo and Asclepius. It wrinkled the nose of Philip with bad memories, or maybe it was the next worsds that Olympias stated.

“I have never acted against the young Prince Caranus or the young Princess Europa.” It brought Attacles’ whole attention to the room and the former Queen of Macedon. “Dionysus’ abandon me if what I just said is falsehood.” It was an oath that the orgiasts gave, also an oath of those truly dedicated to Dionysus, and not a kind one to break. It would not bring the Furies upon the head of an oath breaker, but those who were as dedicated to Dionysus’ truth knew that his Maenaeds were those who had abandoned, betrayed, or misused his trust in them. It was not a kind fate, for while the Maenaeds themselves might not remember their ascension to the position, they would remember what caused the ascension as it was ripped from them. In using those words, Olympias stated that she had danced with Dionysus in the past, and even now believed in him.

What worried Attacles was not that, that was acceptable. His relationship with the gods was shaky at best, and he had no issue with which gods a man had most dear in his heart, unless it stated that he himself was wrong for who he was. He was worried that he had been noticed by Olympias, that his niece Europa had been noticed by her. Caranus would have been noticed with any truth of the matter, his position being equivalent to Alexander’s even if he was untested even in the ability to walk. Europa was usually not. “ I take your word as full truth.” Full truth if not full honesty, and the ability to distinguish those words with full knowledge of the need for the difference.

“Olympias?” Philip was curious of this. “I had not heard that…”

“I found a snake in Caranus’ cradle in my uncle’s rooms. The snake didn’t survive me finding it, but I called the guards.”

“I thought it might have been Olympias, or perhaps an accident.” Polyperchon scrambled to explain something that he had not told the King of. “My man who knows of things such as snakes said that the snake was local to the area.”

“And you took his word at this?” Anger, now, and Polyperchon could not repress a grin that the king had the energy to display such anger, even if it was aimed at him. Across the room, Antipater was echoing his joy in the king’s growing vigor. “Man, speak!”

“Based on the fact that I had already had Olympias’ rooms searched, and the snake corpse’ matched none of the snakes to whom I became,” _intimately,_ unfortunately, he thought. “acquainted during that visit, I dismissed it.”

“It may have been Eurydice.” Antipater was speaking now, scrambling to cover his friend’s retreat to safety. “And we will never know.” A pause, and Philip’s breathing slowed as Antipater asked the next question. “What did your investigation find?” His fellow general shot him a glare, much to the bemusement of the question’s asker.

“Conspiracy.” A harsh word that Polyperchon used to its full effects, Hephaistion admired that of the man. ”Conspiracy and treachery are what my investigation found, and of men we trusted.”

“Speak then.” Philip knew that those in the room would find out eventually through other sources, and he chose not to dismiss any of them. “Speak so I may know of who wished me dead enough to act on such a wish.”

“It started with Pausanias, when you lost interest in the youth.” Hard words, used to remind Philip of the human face of the first assassin. “Attalus engineered a party in which the boy was raped, remember? He came to ask you for justice, and,”

“and I denied it because Attalus had said the boy had wanted hard sex, and did I truly not trust his word in the matter, even if the boy was traumatized by what he received of his wish.” Philip realized. “What then.”

“Attalus implied that he had received permission for the rape from you, and it had been an implication that hard sex was what he wanted.” Bitter words, and Attacles’ felt his eyes caught by Hephaistion’s, held in place and empathy rather than sympathy. “He manipulated Pausanias into the belief that to kill you would be to fulfill justice, so murder of kings rather than assassination.” It had been no comfort to be vindicated in that, Hephaistion thought, and wished it were not so, that another man had been victimized by a man he had dismissed as irrelevant after a blatant attempt on himself. “ Attalus also managed to convince Leonnatus, the second assassin, that it would be in his best interests and the best interests of his liege to participate in a plot on your life.” That would not have been hard to do, Hephaistion had spent much time dissuading Leonnatus that assassination was an ill advised method of moving Alexander closer to the throne of Macedon.

“What else? Who else?”

“Eurydice was involved, Attalus used the dangle of Queen Mother of the King of Macedon to insure that she did not think deeply on the implications of plotting against you.”

“That implies that she could think deeply.” Philip disagreed with that. “She could not.”

“I am amazed the girl managed to conceal her involvement so long from you, or her cousin.” Antipater sneered at the girl’s memory. “She was an idiot.”

“There were others involved. The ambassador from Athens received a large sum of money from Demosthenes to facilitate your demise.” Polyperchon reported. “Being confronted with this, he named that other members of the embassies were involved, as well as the Persians.”

A new soldier entered, nodding to Polyperchon with a frown of worry overlaying a triumphic aura. His boots were scuffed, and blood lightly dusted his knuckles.

“The Persians?” Philip was nodding. “I can certainly understand why.” It would halt preparations for war against Persia, perhaps even end them for a time if he would die while they were still softening up Persia for invasion. “Attalus was not making deals with the Persians?” Attalus was one of his generals, along with Parmenion, on the front with Persia.

“If I understand the conspiracy correctly,” and Polyperchon was correct in this. “they were more aligned out of common interests in your death. After you were to die, the crew would disperse, and the ship would be abandoned.” A ship analogy worked for those who had spent time in Athens. “My men have just arrived with news, if they may?”

The king nodded, and the soldier who had only recently arrived still sporting the signs of squirmish began to report.

“All that you wished for, based on the names that you were given have been retrieved.” The soldier’s heels were tight together and a fist whitened on the sword. “None of those alive have the name of the Persian woman involved, so we have not caught her, and when we began to question the Persian man and the man of Thrace, they died against the floor, eyes bleeding.”

“Oaths sworn.” Hephaistion answered the questioning looks being interchanged. “Given to a deity and death granted to prevent that they break them unwillingly or willingly. Most of our gods have no history of granting such oaths.”

“You know this how?” Antipater hated such things, the gods dancing in his life no matter that Athena saved the king’s life gave him less of a belief that he had any say in how he managed his own life.

“I am sworn to Aphrodite.” Hephaistion remembered that, and all that it meant and could mean, not that Antipater with his belief in independence uninfringed upon by gods understood those possibilities. Things were given and taken, and given in return. “My mother is also of Aphrodite, for all my father is Amyntor.”

“Good enough.” Philip wished less discussion of this, and certainly less words out of the devoted’s mouth. What Hephaistion spoke of implied that he owed debts now, and possibly owed them twice, and he hated to remember what could be asked of him for them. “I wish Attalus apprehended, and I will make an example of him.”

“An example of him?” Polyperchon wanted the words said so that this could not be ignored when the words came time to be brought to life. It would be bad if the traitor-general spoke words that changed his liability and death sentence.

“I will have him left exposed and untouched within Pella, having been brought to me forcefully, caged, and dragged through every major place of dwelling from his post to Pella, whilst stripped naked.” It was not sufficiently violent to his tastes, but Polyperchon thought it certainly had insult within it. “Eurydice’s corpse will be bound to him as he died.”

That worked. “Sir, who would you have return him to you?” Antipater asked, anticipating his dismissal to the Persian front.

“Polyperchon must hunt the rest of this conspiracy.” Philip replied. “I wish you to fetch him, and you will leave when Eumenes draws up papers of passage to the border, so that my loyal men there do not take you wrongly.”

“Sir.” It would be, Polyperchon gratefully thought, a long few days for Antipater, who would ride hard to the front to try and reach Attalus before he received word that his sentence had been spoken after his niece’s failure at her task. “Sir, what of his kin?”

“Young Attacles has just been promoted.” Philip smiled. “For his turn in giving you this information, presumably, he will obtain his father’s titles and possessions, except that of General, as he has no experience of war.”

“My king?” Attacles thought he understood it.

“You now are the guard of my son and daughter still not yet youths.” Philip nodded. The man was cautious, which boded well. Meda would tell him more of the man later tonight. “Keep them safe for me.”

“ _Prayers lift from my lips to the ears of my gods, blessings and praise implicit in my body of world and mind.”_ Barsine felt the stone of the cavern underneath her knees as she knelt in the shrine, entrance dusty and partially obscured, crowded with the shrines of those alien to Macedon and Greece, a quiet place in comparison to the larger cavern that held the shrines of the Olympians. The shrines at Pella were given a larger area, not this crowded room formerly storage, Pella’s status as the capital and the home of the multitude of embassies even meaning that the Olympians had temples. “ _Child taken from my grasp, may it yet find me, engendered and blossoming between hips, giving power over the man who will be king to another.”_

The incense that swept through her nose caused her smile to creep from the blow that Alexander’s lust for his whore had given her, her careful preparations blowing into the man who could not give him what she could, and could not be wife or queen. At least it had not been a woman Alexander had tumbled in his lust, slaking his body in Hephaistion’s body meant that she had not lost the child those herbs engendered to another.

Rising from the floor, she smoothed the cloak over the gauze of her chiton, feeling it catch on the skin roughened by pressing against the stone of the cavern, and she let her sandals pad against the floor, leading to the door, out and into the main sanctuary.

From a corner of her eyes, Barsine could see the face of the priest of Apollo who had attended the king in profile, his hands laying on the arm of another worshipper here in the sanctuaries, his mouth set as he murmured what she recognized bits and pieces of.

“Lord of healing, Apollo let my hands to the duties that you taught your son Asclepius in and give healing to this man, devoted of the gods and worthy of your attention. A cock will be given in your name should he receive pleasure in another’s body,” she could hear, and the man beside Apollocles caught her eye.

“Sir,” She asked, the man the priest in training by Apollocles, an apprentice learning practically the skills that a temple could not teach. “I had heard that your master had in his care the brother of my Lord.”

“Your lord?” It was a wary young thing, cute with a face still clean from overly much hair and a smile that threatened at her hand on his arm and her breasts pushing against his side through both the cloak and the chiton, a worthwhile reason, Barsine thought to leave them unbound. “My master has many in his care.”

“My lord, the Prince Alexander.” The widened eyes and the body that drew back from her meant he was smart enough not to dally with her even if he wished to, which was unfortunate. Given the appropriate blessings of her gods, she would not conceive, and a few herbs would do the trick should they disapprove. “His brother, Arrhidaeus. Injured, still asleep, the last time that my Lord received any information of this.”

“Still asleep.” The boy gasped out as she shifted such that her cloak exposed some of her body and Barsine felt the invitation curl her lips as her body was slightly revealed. “The damage that was done, may leave him asleep until he dies. My teacher says that it will help me learn of such injuries, madam.”

“Thank you.” A coup, Barsine knew. Being at that ambush had been a mistake, and she would rather not work on the dirty work herself, even if she doubted he had seen her. The idiot boy would die without her intervention, and no longer be a threat to her baby as her lover’s heir.

“Father?” It was not the most contentious of this night’s conversations, Hephaistion knew as the night truly crept through Aigai. Simply put, it was the most tense conversation to him personally of the conversations that he had participated in or observed, and he did not wish to do this again soon. While it was a relief to have some knowledge of who had been caught on this night, even if agents were still missing, Hephaistion thought that the knowledge that such a large conspiracy had existed without his knowledge and either faint oversight or slight sabotage insulted his sense of strength within his own powers. He was certainly not as beneficial an aide to his King as he should be, and Hephaistion wondered at how he would remedy that in the coming months. “Father, are you alright?”

The purpling bruises around King Philip’s throat were noticeable in the light of the lamps of the king’s personal sitting area in his suite, and he could name the cause of the dent in the arm of the seating from which Philip was surveying the room. Such a nasty reason for a man who looked every inch of his regal and powerful self in the chiton that contrasted. Such a brilliant white with against the vermilion cloth of the pillows that padded the king’s rear and they had been puddle against the floor as if a part of his blood, dripping out of his veins and onto the floor, but that was something that he couldn’t spare the emotion to think on, when it was his duty to his King to pay attention to King Philip’s conversations in this, even if the King and his King were in conversation. Conversation that was…”Yes, yes, yes Alexander!”

“Father?” 

“Apologies.” Not actually apologetic, but apologies made conversations more smooth, something that Philip must have realized over the years. “Meda was being rather involved in my health earlier. How was your day?”

“I lost my bed partner last night when you summoned me, and after that I never recovered him, but I spent an amusing day with Ptolemy and Cleitus.” Alexander thought on that, skin between his eyes creasing as he frowned in memory. “I was enjoying Barsine’s attention when your secretary appeared to summon me again.”

“How is your Persian woman?” That was an interesting formulation, but it begged the question of what it meant that it was the first thought that Philip had of Barsine’s place in Alexander’s coterie. “Is her mouth as skilled as it looks?”

“She taught me fluent Persian,” That she had, horizontally, “enough so that when I met with the Persian delegation to Athens,” she had shared his bed before Alexander had fled the city of Pella and the whole of his father’s court, to Hephaistion’s knowledge, but had not retained the position of concubine until after Alexander returned from his exile. “I could speak with the Persians without issues, in both Ionian Greek and Persian.”

“Then she gave you skills as well.” Philip’s mouth was tilting. “Why haven’t you used it here?”

“Why do you sometimes pretend to speak only Macedonian with new men around from Greece? They underestimate me, and realize not that I fully understand them.” A pause, and the familiar throat gulped in breath, eyes a slate blue and following his father’s hands, to Hephaistion’s eyes. The knife that Philip held looked sharp, certainly, and most likely was being kept that way by the stone held in Philip’s opposite hand. “What happened to your throat, Father?”

Alexander had probably already heard some of the story, in a court very little could be kept quiet, and the removal of the corpse of a queen from the King’s bedchambers was not one of them. The king’s hoarseness and the specks of red around his eyes spoke to something happening, if not what.

“Attalus conspired against me.” A gasp of surprise was the sound that made Hephaistion look questioningly at his King. That Attalus was certainly capable of such treachery had been apparent to him when he’d heard of the man’s ambitions for his niece, and he had told Alexander of this, though if Alexander had not realized the full extent of what that would mean, it was not his fault, at least not solely. “He was integral in persuading Pausanias to act against me, and committed _hubris_ against him, violating not only his body but his dignity with his persuasions. When Leonnatus failed, he had told his niece to take personal action should the attempts not go as planned against me.”

“Leonnattus was not loyal to Attalus.” It was a fairly accurate assumption. “There was a conspiracy of multiple factions.” At last, his tutoring in subterfuge had sunk into his politically minded’ King’s mind. It had only taken multiple tries. “Leonnatus’ loyalty was to me, but he acted outside of acceptable realms, as my spy master has laid down.”

“Your Hephaistion has not forbidden assassination,” the eyes that Hephaistion felt, the king’s singular eye, the second obscured by furrowed flesh , and the newly strange echoed stare from Alexander made the flesh within his stomach clench and release, as if fluttering into the dances that he remembered an exiled priestess teach him so many years before in his childhood by the sea. “he has only forbidden such activities that would eventually prove to be potentially deadly to you. In the past year he has initiated the death of two people who had plotted against your life, and the year before that, two days after you returned from exile, he executed someone who was to make an attempt on your life.”

“I knew of the assassinations, but not of the first attempt.” It was clear that his King could not comprehend Hephaistion acting in such a pre-emptive manner, his training with the things of soldiers and his actions on the battle field seeming to be in disregard to his devotions to Aphrodite. Those of Aphrodite rarely did but manipulate the actions of others for their own ends. “Who was he?”

“His name is irrelevant.” Hephaistion had not wish to be enmeshed in this disagreement. “He had a bow set so that he would pierce your torso, most likely your heart from the roof of the Palace at Pella, that morning that you resumed morning practice with Cassander. I had heard something of his intentions,”

“you begged off practice,”

“I excused myself from practice with dual reasons.” He had been triply sore, from the departure duties that Philip had asked of him, his welcome of Alexander to the court, and a bad fall the night before. “I found him on the roof, and got to him before the guards did, and _convinced_ him to cease his shot.”

“With a sword across the throat.” Philip laughed. “Your master of spiders has many skills to keep you alive, not just the gathering of information, but the ability to use it.” Searing eyes went from gentle, thankful embrace on Hephaistion to a sharpened glare on Alexander’s father, jealousy and possessive behavior that Hephaistion knew his father shared, to the point of willfully acting against his son’s possession and keeping that possession to ensure his son’s return and good behavior. “Leonnatus,” Hephaistion realized that the king must be afraid to pull the conversation away from a taunting compliment of his son and back to the purpose of the conversation. For all that Philip loved his son, he was no kind King to not test his son’s sovereign state of mind. “Leonnatus was loyal to you, but disobedient. Polyperchon has names, and Antipater is retrieving Attalus from the border.”

“He is to be punished?” It was a violent question, with Alexander’s will being to maim the man or men who had acted against his father, as he had whispered into Hephaistion’s ear so many nights before. Just two, Hephaistion knew, but pleasure interrupted was in many ways worse than the lack of their pleasure, tightening nerves and tapping along muscles tense with anticipation. “Are his entrails to be spread to the sun as the blood pools in his belly and he sees the infection setting into his body as the soothsayers read from a human spread? Is he to be pierced through the body and left on the embankment around Pella as a warning? Is he to be left without water and staked within sight of the cistern as thirst and hunger kills him?”

“Violent, but accurate.” Philip’s lips tilted and his eyes set into the skull, watching the son that he had barely raised but mirrored some of his intentions. “I will have him staked in the center of the agora in Pella, left untouched and tied to the corpse of his niece. She tried to smother the breath from my body, and Eurydice will still receive burial as a daughter of her house. Attalus will be left without the rituals of death.”

“You would curse his soul to wander?” A gasping breath, a hacking cough as the King fought for triumphant air at his son’s recognition of the punishment. It was said to have been the punishment of those two brothers who had fought against each other for the position of the King of Thebes as enacted by their successor in his rage as to the state they had left Thebes in. The curse of the line of Oedipus, not that they made unnatural choices in search of a son, but that they never died a death that allowed them to be buried correctly, the second perhaps an effect of the first. “Would that bring death upon our house?”

“No!” Cleon’s house had Thanatos’ stalk it, taking Antigone and Cleon’s son, and the sister of Antigone, all for abandoning a corpse to the dogs rather than give it burial, dooming the soul. “Justice given for the crime of wishing to assassinate a ruler by law.”

“Pausanias will receive full rituals.” Alexander postulated. The body had yet to be released to his grieving parents, struck with awe at the daring of their son and shock at his near success. Pausanias would not be spoken against again within their house.

“He wished to kill a man who denied him justice, a man who happened to be a king.” Philip’s hands were again playing with the dagger and rubbing against the side wrapped in bandages. “I cannot deny him his place among his kin for that.”

“I agree.” Alexander might not, but Hephaistion did, and Alexander mouthed the words that his beloved would have said, choosing his beloved’s expedient words instead of his own angered words. Too easily could Attalus come to haunt their line. Far, far too easily. “Why else have you summoned me?” Better not to ask the question, Hephaistion had conveyed to his King, but rather to ask a more mutually pressing question.

“I have already lifted your house arrest.” Indeed, Eumenes had received that order and the soldiers sent with him to the villa outside of the palace had conveyed that order most likely, to their brethren guarding the villa. “I have a mission for you.”

“Father?” Hephaistion had wondered at this, unable to gain understanding of the king’s summons of his son, if it were not to punish him for the actions of his errant Companion.

“Well, you and all of your companions.” Hephaistion let himself lean into the wall, knowing that his posture would not hold his full weight, after this long while lacking sleep. “It started with the conspiracy. A large sum of money was sent to the Athenian ambassador here by Demosthenes to facilitate my death.”

“A professional?” An unwelcome interruption, to judge by the King’s expulsion of breath and the creak of the dagger upon the sharpening blade.

“A professional who appears to have died upon the seas while trying to make his way north to Macedon. However,” Philip seemed to have heard other things. “with the rumblings of war along our borders with my supposed death, I want you to go to Athens.”

“You think that there is another assassin in Athens?”

“I think that every conspirator was not caught, and that Demosthenes still wishes me dead. I want him to no longer wield the power to pay for me to die, not without repercussions.”

“You are insulted that the man paid for you to die?” A conversation between the King and the Prince, and Hephaistion wondered at the rising voices and what it meant that they kept on rising as if anger was the only thing that was being conveyed.

“I am insulted in that, and that they,” stuttering anger, breathing heavy before Philip paused to suck a breath through his roughened throat. “That they would not respect me enough to ask one loyal to them to try to kill me instead.”

“So this is about that insult?”

“It is about the fact that the Persians and the Athenians were both involved in acts against me!” A thundering roar. “I wish you, your tongue fluent in Persian, and your companions to go to Athens and find if that is the only conspiracy that the Senate breeds!”

“All of us?”

“You, your brother, Ptolemy, Cleitus, Cassander, Hephaistion, even.” Slighter, they were pulling away from the anger and being more quiet.

“Arrhidaeus is still unable to wake.” Alexander whispered. It was no secret to the court that neither Ptolemy nor Philip had ever acknowledged a potential biological relationship, even if some of the court thought he was one of the first proofs that the man now the King of Macedon was virile. Something that his son had yet to prove to the court’s content. “He cannot come with us.”

“I wish you in Athens, and if you should come across that assassin, I would like confirmation of his death.” A throat still raspy echoed earlier parts of their conversation. “Violent death.”


End file.
